The volume of digital data within businesses is exploding, and digital evidence is now central to how enterprise organisations are reviewing fraud and misconduct cases. With remote working and the introduction of AI into business processes, enterprises now carry 4.31 times as many critical vulnerabilities as before AI-powered software development, while applications are built almost five times faster.
This speed cuts both ways: it drives innovation, but it also creates more entry points, blind spots and, unfortunately, more opportunities for fraud, misconduct and data exposure that can slip through unnoticed.
To combat this, businesses are using the same investigative techniques as police forces to root out fraud and catch what manual reviews miss. Uncovering the most amount of device data in digital investigations is often critical to find critical evidence, and these techniques aren’t just reserved for the police alone. Enterprise, corporate, legal and security teams now have the ability to pull digital evidence and follow patterns to build a case fast.
Fraud is moving at machine speed
AI helps enterprise security and investigation teams uncover the facts behind digital risk and move relevant evidence into actionable insights to strengthen security before it becomes a bigger problem. This gives corporate investigators the same ability and speed that criminal investigators are relying on to detect patterns in crimes.
Remote working has taken what we thought we knew of business processes and redefined it, and now businesses are operating in a new normal. What was once data held in a more predictable location has meant employees can access data from workplace applications, computers and mobile devices anywhere, and enterprises are more concerned about how to handle critical issues of fraud and sensitive data being shared and exposed.
AI helps enterprise teams move from manual evidence review to AI-assisted investigation that surfaces connections in minutes rather than weeks for internal corporate investigations spanning employee misconduct to financial fraud, insider threat, incident response and regulatory and compliance matters.
Enterprise teams typically run four to six mobile examinations a month on top of ongoing computer and cloud data reviews, and reviewing that volume manually, file by file and message by message, is exactly why a matter that should close in days can stretch into weeks.
The impact has meant that the technology that offers speed and efficiency, and the same techniques used in serious criminal casework such as narcotics and homicides, can now be used in corporate environments as well.
Going deeper into hard-to-reach data
Application developers are creating and developing apps as quickly as possible without thinking about how investigators will uncover evidence hidden within. AI and cloud technology go deep and bring together siloed platforms into one unified environment, and this is where an investigation either moves forward or gets stopped in its tracks.
Corporate data is spread across managed laptops, personal phones, shared drives and a growing list of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Teams and Slack. The biggest obstacle for investigators is that each one stores and encrypts data differently, hiding evidence between the cracks.
If this is left unaddressed, it is the exact kind of gap that criminals abuse, which lets serious incidents run undetected. The average malicious insider breach takes the better part of a year to detect and contain, and by the time the financial and reputational cost is realised, it’s already too late.
Mobile devices are now involved in 97% of criminal investigations, and bringing that, among all the other fragmented, siloed data, into one environment means investigators aren’t having to dig deep to stitch a case together from disconnected sources, they’re instead working from a single picture that security teams can act on. This allows security teams to close the gap before it goes too far.
Unstructured chaos into actionable insights
A financial fraud case doesn’t wait for an investigator to manually cross-reference laptops, phones and three different chat apps, and neither does an insider threat that’s already 200 days into moving data before anyone notices. That’s the real value of applying police-grade techniques inside the enterprise. The value isn’t speed alone; it’s how fast that gap between incident and detection closes.
A recent case recovered data from a destroyed device, leaving only an SD card with hours of video. Police teams use AI-assisted analysis to surface information to verify the date, times and other crucial pieces of evidence to secure a conviction within an hour. Reviewing this footage manually would have taken hours, potentially days, and the trail easily could’ve gone unnoticed. Businesses can use these same techniques in the enterprise environment.
A vulnerability count 4.31 times higher than before AI-powered development, applications shipping five times faster and evidence scattered across managed devices, personal phones and messaging apps that were never built for investigators, that combination isn’t going away. What changes is whether teams are still working case by case, file by file or whether they can pull evidence together, spot the pattern and act on it in minutes.
For enterprise security, legal and compliance teams, that’s no longer a nice-to-have borrowed from law enforcement; it’s becoming the baseline for how fraud, misconduct and insider threats get caught before they turn into the kind of story that ends up in front of the board.
John Lucey is VP EMEA at Cellebrite
Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Hirurg
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