With over a thousand social media sites across the internet and billions of active users, police and other law enforcement authorities have a treasure trove of information at their fingertips when conducting cybercrime investigations.

With the number of active users continuing to increase, nearly every investigation includes a cyber investigation component where computer forensic investigators collect, process, and analyze evidence using state-of-the-art software.

The prevalence of social media has made it so it can be used by cybercrime investigators investigating a petty crime committed by young offenders to the more complex and deadly attacks carried out by international terror organizations.

Some criminals can’t resist bragging online about their exploits, with some criminals actually uploading pictures and videos while in the midst of committing the crime. And while some might be smarter than others and set their settings as private as possible, others like friends or family might not be as savvy and might share the posts, making them public and open the door to cybercrime investigators to collect any and all information.

Social media sites hold an unparalleled amount of hidden information that can be extracted by digital forensic investigators for cyber investigations, from text to pictures to videos, all of which can be identified and analyzed by solutions offered by Cobwebs.

Without knowing it, suspects can be identified and tracked down by a variety of tools by digital forensic investigators.

Even the smartest threat actor and criminal leave their digital footprint that can be identified by analyzing the technical details of electronic activity, behavior, and cyber information such as IP addresses, time-stamps, device indicators, and more.

These digital footprints are crucial for cyber investigations, but with the seemingly never-ending mountain of intelligence, digital forensic investigators need the proper tools and solutions to navigate the increasingly complex levels of data.

Using natural language processing and automated artificial intelligence tools, law enforcement officials can automatically scan, monitor, and manage social platforms for keywords. The solutions can also reveal all the relevant locations that the individual might be associated with by identifying check-ins, places mentioned and more.

Cobwebs’ artificial intelligence search engines are capable of sifting through an infinite amount of critical data, optimizing investigations into cybercrime by extracting precise and targeted intelligence in real-time.

The tools can also generate relevant alerts when intelligence is detected as well as generate customizable automated reports which can be extracted when needed.

The artificial intelligence tools used in Cobwebs’ platforms are able to not only visualize the connections, strengths, and relations between suspect individuals and identify target profiles and groups, with deep image analysis the platform can transform a single lead into  comprehensive in-depth cyber investigations.

In addition to mining social media for evidence of crimes, using geolocation, metadata, social networking, and more, cybercrime investigators can employ new techniques that just a few years ago didn’t exist.

Harnessing these tools can give the computer forensic investigator the relevant intelligence to catch criminals before they commit their next crime.