The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Cyber Crimes Center (C3) in Fairfax, Virginia.
The C3 center has just expanded into a 5000 square foot facility.
The Department of Homeland Security’ (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently moved into an expanded cyber forensics lab. The new lab includes investigators who examine breached networks and exposed data. However, some of the investigators at the DHS are responsible for helping to electronically track down transnational cybercriminals that traffic in stolen information, credit cards, child pornography, fake documents and drugs.
According to the press release, the C3 facility in Fairfax, Va., just moved into a 5,000-square-foot forensic laboratory. The upgraded space includes the ability to conduct cyber operations, including closer analysis of criminal hard drives as well as video and audio forensic capabilities. The C3 provides computer and cyber-based technical services to support domestic and international investigations that include cross-border crimes.
The facility received data from hundreds of field offices in the U.S. and overseas, as well as state, local and international law enforcement agencies. The C3 has over 275 computer forensics agents. I have received petabytes* of data. The data has been collected from electronic files, hard disk drives, cell phones and more. All of the data needs to be investigated as part of criminal investigations.
According to DHS, in fiscal 2014 C3 processed 5.2 petabytes. That is equivalent of 83 billion pages of images or 95 billion PowerPoint files. The volume of data presented by field agents increased 4,000 percent between 2004 and 2012.
The new C3 facilities include expanded space for the computer forensics unit, the cybercrimes unit and the child exploitation unit. In addition, the agency has substantially upgraded software, digital analysis and other advanced and sometimes customized forensics IT.
Field offices also look to C3 for cyber support to help track criminals online.
*A petabyte (PB) is 1015 bytes of data, 1,000 terabytes (TB) or 1,000,000 gigabytes (GB).