Deloitte’s Dublin office has launched an IT forensic team as part of its Enterprise Risk Services division with a view to helping Irish companies combat corporate crime.
The consultancy firm claimed that computers are now used in the majority of frauds and other offences affecting Irish business, not only to commit crimes but to plan them and to cover any tracks afterwards.
IT forensics involves recovering and analysing deleted, cached and hidden data from IT equipment such as PCs, PDAs, servers and mobile phones. The Deloitte IT Forensic Unit plans to offer a range of services including: incident response, evidential data recovery, data analysis and reporting, post-incident lock-down of equipment and electronic intelligence management.
The unit is also a partner of the Dublin software developer PixAlert and Deloitte uses the company’s image detection tool to search corporate networks for inappropriate content and illicit or illegal images.
Another service the forensics team offers is analysis of data such as payroll and accounts payable information in order to eliminate anomalies within an organisation such as duplicate vendor payments, invalid VAT numbers and payments to dormant vendor accounts.
Andrew Harbison heads up the new unit, having recently joined Deloitte from Ernst & Young. Harbison has successfully concluded more than 150 IT investigations during the past four years and is a veteran “white-hat” hacker, having conducted and managed a large number of vulnerability assessments and penetration tests of the IT systems of major Irish and international companies.
By Gordon Smith
