FREETOOL Ethos

The development of cybercrime investigation tools is an industry worth millions of euro. Although commercial tools offer a degree of reliability and technical support, they come with a high price tag. This makes them prohibitively expensive for police forces on small budgets. The creation of free, effective, reliable tools for cybercrime investigators would therefore greatly assist the global fight against cybercrime. A growing number of cybercrime investigators develop their own tools to support their investigations. These may also be used within a unit/jurisdiction but often are not shared with the wider community. Quite often the developed tools offer the same (and sometimes more advanced) levels of functionality than commercial options.

The FREETOOL Project brings together such developers and offers them a platform for collaboration and distribution. Our motivation for developing tools are often due to the cost of, failings of, or lack of alternative commercial solutions.

FREETOOL applications are developed by law enforcement officers, for law enforcement officers, and are therefore are designed to meet their requirements.

They are freely and exclusively available to the law enforcement community and always will be.

2012
DG HOME awarded funds to UCD Centre for Cybersecurity & Cybercrime Investigation (UCD-CCI) to establish a community of software developers, from the law enforcement community, who would create free forensic tools for law enforcement.

2015
First iteration of project concluded with the production of 7 forensic tools, a methodology and framework for future software development and a community of over 100 software developers and testers from EU law enforcement agencies. UCD-CCI were successful in pursuing additional funding to extend the scope of the initiative, by incorporating additional tool development and enhancing tool maintenance.

2017
The second FREETOOL project had produced 12 comprehensive tools for digital forensics and cybercrime investigations. Thanks to Europol, for their valued assistance with promotion and dissemination to the community, and The European Cybercrime Training and Education Group (ECTEG), for incorporating FREETOOL outputs in their training, the tools produced by the project are now being used by thousands of law enforcement agents from across the world. The increased community feedback has prompted the tool refinement initiatives in the latest project.

2019
The main objective of FREETOOL v3.0 is to vastly enhance the usability and accessibility of the outputs from previous FREETOOL projects through a comprehensive programme of large scale user testing, tool refinement, tool packaging and resource development. Work is well underway in the latest iteration of the FREETOOL project, with some exciting developments to be released by the end of the project, in the final quarter of 2021.

2022
Collaborating with the European Anti-Cybercrime Technology Development Association (EACTDA), six FREETOOL applications underwent further development and testing. The Tools4LEAs project funded this initiative. Tools4LEAs aims to deliver dependable, well-tested tools to European public security practitioners for free.

Acknowledgements

Countries Participating in Development
Map countries participating in development

Partners and Supporting Organisations
Partners and oupporting organisations