How BAE Systems fights paedophiles and cyber criminals

BAE Systems is better known for submarines and fighter jets than helping protect vulnerable children, but its cyber-security arm Detica has won recognition for its work with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre to track down internet sex abusers.

Cyber-crime: Detica's high-tech systems can rapidly sift enormous amounts of data and identify patterns.

Detica has been appointed a strategic partner by CEOP after its high-tech systems, which can rapidly sift enormous amounts of data, dramatically reduced the time taken to identify offenders and safeguard children at risk. 

It saved 330 working days for CEOP during Operation Rescue, a three year investigation by international police forces led by a UK team, which shut down the world’s biggest internet paedophile ring discovered to date.

The global forum had 70,000 followers at its peak, leading to 4,000 intelligence reports being sent to police across 30 countries. Operation Rescue is still going on and so far has targeted 240 offenders in the UK, arrested 121 and protected 60 children. 

CEOP was set up in 2006 and is affiliated to the Serious Organised Crime Agency. It has built a huge bank of knowledge on how offenders think and behave.

Detica’s expertise is in tackling cybercrime and terrorism, with clients including governments. It also works for banks and insurance companies which want to detect and prevent fraud, and other businesses looking to protect themselves.

Its technology is capable of sifting through mountains of seemingly disparate data and identifying patterns that otherwise would be virtually impossible to spot.

In the case of paedophile rings, Detica can sieve through tens of thousands of internet messages and produce ‘risk scores’ on individuals, based on the language they use and their postings.

It has produced bespoke data analysis tools to reconstruct conversations, to produce profiles of suspects and to prioritise intelligence dossiers in a fraction of the time this would take using conventional methods.

‘The work we have done has freed up people at CEOP to concentrate on investigative work instead of being tied up with data processing,’ said Martin Sutherland, managing director of Detica.