Cyber crime investigations in the era of big data

The amount of data seized in Crime Investigations has increased enormously. Investigators are more than ever confronted with vast amount of heterogeneous data, highly-diverse data formats, increased complexity in distributed stored information. With constantly increasing network bandwidth it makes extremely challenging to process or even store part of the network traffic. Nevertheless, criminal investigations need to solve crimes in a timely manners. New computational methods, infrastructure and algorithmic approaches are required. Although Big Data is a challenge for criminal investigators, it can also help them make to source an detect patterns to prevent and solve crimes. This paper aims to raise attention to current challenges in Cyber Crime Investigations - related to Big Data - and possible ways to approach combating cybercrimes.