Digital forensic platform Hansken wins European Public Sector Award
A milestone for Hansken in Maastricht today: the digital forensic platform won first prize in the ‘Digital Transformation’ category at the European Public Sector Awards (EPSA). In total, 151 innovative projects were competing, of which 54 in the digital transformation category.
The jury on Hansken
“By promoting strong cooperation in digital forensic analysis between international criminal justice actors, the Hansken team has built up a unique and trusted community of Hansken users. It’s great to see that this international cooperation is enabling Hansken to grow and innovate further, resulting in an increasing number of organisations being assisted in handling forensic evidence”, said the EPSA jury.
Hansken supports the transformation of digital forensics
The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) started developing a forensic search engine in 2012 to help investigative agencies investigate large quantities of digital trace evidence quickly and efficiently. Data carriers seized by the police, such as computers and mobile phones, contain a lot of information and digital evidence. Particularly in fraud, murder and child abuse cases, investigating officers have to work their way through huge mountains of data. Hansken enables fast and very specific searches.
Digital data is becoming increasingly important in police investigations
The use of digital data is increasing every day. Investigators see this in their cases, where they encounter more digital evidence daily. With Hansken, detectives and digital experts can manage these large volumes of data and so work together efficiently in their investigations. Hansken automatically indexes all the digital trace evidence. Users can then search for words, names and numbers, for example, or for properties of trace evidence such as emails, chat messages, photos and locations.
International community
Hansken has more than proven itself and has already been very important in many hundreds of cases. These include cases involving messages using the crypto communication service EncroChat. The platform is used by virtually all the investigative agencies in the Netherlands and is now being developed further and used by a worldwide community of law enforcement partners. Together, they are continually working on innovations, such as the use of AI in the platform. This allows users to search for objects in photos, for example. In this way, the investigative agencies of different countries help each other by providing access to knowledge and information that is already present.
