An announcement was made today by SurfRecon, Inc. in which it stated that has collected over 10 million image hashes for use with its SurfRecon rapid-image-analysis forensic tool, making their image-hash database the largest collection of image-hash data available to law enforcement in the world; Furthermore, end-of-year estimates put the image-hash database at well over 300 million. The hash collection includes a diversity of images and icons from operating systems, applications, websites, pornography collections, and child-pornography collections.

    All of these hashes are stored in the International Forensic Image-hash Database (IFID) and are leveraged by the SurfRecon LE e-discovery and forensic tool to allow an investigator to quickly and efficiently find, analyze, categorize, and report on any pornographic or child-pornographic content that exits on a suspect computer.

    "The more hashes we collect, the greater the number of images and digital video files we can pre-categorize. It simply makes SurfRecon and those individuals who use it more effective at finding illegal and unwanted content", said Matthew Yarro, VP of Marketing for SurfRecon, Inc.

    Furthermore, submissions from the law-enforcement community combined with SurfRecon's Seeker™ technology account for nearly one million new image hashes added to the IFID each day. At the current growth rate, the IFID could far exceed 300 million image hashes by the end of 2008.

    The IFID hash database enables SurfRecon products to quickly pre-categorize any images found on almost any Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computer system into a "safe", "sexual", or "child pornography" category. SurfRecon also includes a number of collaboration and obfuscation tools that not only allow an investigator to share information with other investigators, but also the software can protect the mental health of individuals who are exposed to dark and disturbing pornographic materials.