Our Mission: We conduct research and develop technologies, capabilities, and practices that organizations can use to develop incident response capabilities and facilitate forensics investigations.

Current tools and processes are inadequate for responding to increasingly sophisticated attackers and cybercrimes. The Digital Intelligence and Investigation Directorate (DIID) is addressing that problem by conducting research and developing technologies, capabilities, and practices that organizations can use to develop incident response capabilities and facilitate forensics investigations. DIID team members also develop advanced tools and techniques to address gaps that are not covered by existing resources.

We leverage social media to uncover malicious activity.

Our research includes leveraging social media to discover malicious activity, protecting mobile devices from unknown malware attacks, and improving automated text extraction and video exploitation.

We develop tools to help law enforcement.

We develop resources and tools to facilitate forensic examinations, including tools to help authorized members of the law enforcement community.

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Help inform our research by sharing your ideas with us. Let us know if you need support from our team.

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Publications & Media

A New Approach to Cyber Incident Response
In this blog post, Anne Connell and Tim Palko describe a tool that their teams are developing to provide the various agencies and organizations that respond to cyber incidents a platform by which to share information and forge collaborations.  

Search for Boston Bombers Likely Relied on Eyes, Not Software
In this article, Todd Waits, a digital investigation and intelligence expert in the CERT Division, talks to Reuters about the potential use of facial-recognition technology in the investigation of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing attack.

DIID Collaborates on Computer Crime Cases
As part of the TJX & Heartland case, DIID team members collaborated with the U.S. Secret Service to collect evidence and create forensic images of the computers involved in the theft of over 130 million credit and debit card numbers, making it the biggest computer crime case ever prosecuted in the United States. The DIID Team also assisted federal law enforcement in acquiring and decrypting data related to the Iceman case, which involved attacks on computers at financial institutions and credit card processing centers.