Now, the pair have combined their expertise as business partners at Binary Intelligence LLC, a private company Swauger began in 2000.
Earlier this year, the company moved into a building on Industrial Drive in Franklin.
“We collect, preserve and analyze digital evidence,” Swauger said. “Almost 99 percent of our cases involve cellphones, computers and tablets, but we can work on anything that can store digital data.”
What has really separated the company, Swauger said, is the work it does now with advance mobile forensics.
“Cellphone forensics is really becoming very challenging,” Swauger said. “There are almost 10,000 different handsets, so it is very hard to standardize the tools.”
Swauger said he was working a civil case in 2009 when he accidentally broke a client phone while trying to download data. That situation got him to do research for a better way to extract information from any device on a more consistent basis. After further experimentation, Swauger was working another case with a broken cellphone and was able to read a large amount of the data and recovered hundreds of text messages that were critical to the case.
The company’s specialty is Chip-Off Forensics, which is the extraction and analysis of data stored on flash memory chips that allows all examiners to acquire all data from devices that are physically damaged, password protected or unsupported by conventional mobile forensic tools.
Swauger said the company is now processing more phones than computers, particularly for law enforcement and litigation cases.
“If we get a phone in, we can read it and repair it in a day or two,” said Daniel Parsons, a computer and mobile forensics examiner for the company. “It is the analysis that can take anywhere from three hours to 300 hours. It’s like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. It is really in-depth when you are trying to get details of proof.”
In terms of future technological advancement, Swauger and Parsons both said there will be challenges.
“It’s always a challenge trying to keep up and stay ahead of the curve,” Swauger said. “But 10 years ago, everyone said computer forensics was going to be dead in five years because of encryption. Could we do an iPhone 5 today if someone walked in here with it? Maybe some, but it is just going to take time to get all the tools in a row.”
Swauger grew up on the west side of Cincinnati with a family history in law enforcement, including his father. Surrounded by that lifestyle, plus his fascination with the rise of computer technology in the 1980s, led him to seek a career involving both. However, computer forensic degrees did not exist then, so Swauger earned an information systems degree from the University of Cincinnati instead. He spent nearly nine years working for the Attorney General’s Office before making this business a full-time priority in 2009.
Hawke earned degrees in law enforcement and network administration from Clark State. He was a special agent for the BCI assisting local, state and federal law enforcement agencies by leading technical investigations and providing advanced digital evidence analysis.
The company’s primary area is the Cincinnati-Dayton region, but it also does work in Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago and Philadelphia
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