Irish business with tools to dig out digital evidence

COMPUTER forensics start-up Cernam is to launch its first product later this month, a tool for gathering legally admissible digital evidence from online sources such as Facebook, blogs and message boards.

The Dublin company sees a gap in the market for capturing online evidence in a forensically sound way, as this is often presented in legal proceedings using just screenshots and printouts, whereas sophisticated tools and processes exist to collect evidence stored on PCs.

In development for over two years, Cernam Capture Preserve remotely grabs evidence for any item of web content, such as a web page, a web-based application, or postings on message boards, blogs or social networks.

The software has been designed to be easy to use for non-technical legal personnel, investigators or human resources managers. Capturing evidence is designed to be as simple as clicking a browser button and customers don’t need to install software to do so.

Cernam’s chief executive Owen O’Connor said growing numbers of people post content online rather than storing it on their own computers. The three most popular web-based email mail services, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, have more than one billion active users between them. Facebook has more than 800 million. Figures from Campaign Monitor from June 2011 show there are at least as many webmail accounts as Microsoft Outlook clients.

Social messaging tools increasingly use similar features to standalone email applications; for example, people can exchange Office documents and other attachments through Facebook.

“Employees are using personal accounts on social networking sites, webmail systems and productivity tools for business, meaning business records are accumulating in those accounts and may be needed for litigation at some point,” says O’Connor.

Cernam’s software is designed to be used in scenarios where employees consent to having their company conduct limited searches such as all messages from a supplier between certain dates. It also tackles the challenges involved in capturing online evidence in a way that can be presented in a legal proceeding.

“Unlike, say, a PC hard disk, you can’t physically seize online evidence, take a forensic copy and lock away the original. The original is effectively under someone else’s control, which makes the integrity of the evidence collection process far more important,” says O’Connor.

Self-funded to date, Cernam employs six people and is based at the NovaUCD business incubator. Following the launch, Cernam expects to release updates this year, covering consent-based capture from webmail systems and enhanced capture options for tools such as Google Docs.

An Ernst Young survey of solicitors at the 14 leading law firms in Ireland last year found digital evidence is now part of most civil and criminal litigation. AL Goodbody’s head of dispute resolution Liam Kennedy said at an e-discovery conference in October that electronic material produced during the discovery process can have a significant bearing on a case’s outcome.