Jump to Content

Media Release

April 7 2006

SAPOL and UniSA join forces to combat crime


A new computer tool designed to investigate electronic crime, jointly developed by the University of South Australia and South Australia Police, will be launched on Monday April 10.

The Zero Skills Analysis Program, or ZSAP, will improve the identification of electronic evidence of crimes relating to terrorist activity, child pornography, counterfeiting and identity fraud, by allowing police officers without specialist IT training to conduct analysis in the field.

Detective Superintendent Tony Rankine of SAPOL’s electronic crime branch says ZSAP allows for the preliminary analysis of a computer without altering any of the data present on that machine.

“This approach will facilitate a more rapid detection of offences,” he says. SAPOL will trial and evaluate the program over coming months.

ZSAP is one of a number of products being developed by UniSA’s Enterprise Security Management Laboratory and SAPOL’s Electronic Crime Section. The two-year old partnership was recently formalised by the signing of a Deed of Collaboration to further a research agenda in the area of computer crime analysis and computer forensics.

Dr Jill Slay, director of UniSA’s ESM Lab, says in the past 10 years, the amount of electronic crime evidence requiring analysis has increased 100,000 times.

“Especially with terrorism as an issue, we now have to sift through ever more electronic evidence,” she says. “Therefore, we have to have a system that does not just rely on the expertise of a small core of police investigators working in Adelaide. ZSAP is a very user-friendly program that will enable forensic analysis, even in regional areas, by simply inserting a CD into a computer.”

Other projects currently being developed by the UniSA/SAPOL partnership include a:
• Laptop identification tool to assist police in the recovery of stolen portable computers;
• Communication analysis tool to capture communications to a computer, flagging emails or other data that relate to cyber-stalking;
• Wireless security project to identify unsecured wireless access points and provided operators with information on securing these points.

Contact for interviews

Media contact

top^