Law Enforcement Officers can use Project VIC hashes in 30+ products to investigate child sexual abuse cases

Project VIC Hashes

Project VIC International works with law enforcement agency partners all over the world to sustain intelligence databases of observed child sexual abuse material. Each partner country that operates a VICS Cloud retains its own VICS formatted intelligence database. Only Law Enforcement Officers who are assigned to investigate child sexual abuse and exploitation are given access to one of these databases. Law Enforcement Officers download this intelligence, commonly known as Project VIC Hashes, into their digital investigation tool of choice and then use that tool to identify known child sexual abuse materials in a case.

The intelligence makes triaging a new case much easier than trying to review all the materials in a case manually. Typically, our intelligence will find 30% or more of child abuse material in a new case. After the automated triage is complete, the tool will show the Law Enforcement Officer how many findings it has based on a categorization used by the officer's country.

The Law Enforcement Officer then reviews the remaining files in the case and finishes categorizing them according to their country's categorization scheme. Once all the files in the case the Law Enforcement Officer is then able to contribute the new findings back to their country's VICS service portal where it is combined with contributions from other cases and made available to other investigators.

How does my Department, or Office, get access to the Project VIC database? We would like to use it for our investigations.

1. Request Access to Project VIC Hashes

Hash intelligence is only given to law enforcement officers who request it from their official email address and have been appointed as crimes against children investigators. Send us a request via the Contact Us button at the bottom of the page to get started or send us a message via the Help Button.

2. Download Hashes

Law Enforcement Officers download hashes from their country's VICS service portal.



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3. Triage Your Case

Upload the hashes into a Project VIC validated tool and then process your case to see if it contains any known child sexual abuse materials. Validated tools will present them in your country's categorization scheme. Project VIC has walkthroughs of the tools we have validated. Send us a request if you would like this training aid.

4. Finish Categorizing

Before closing your case we ask our law enforcement partners to finish categorizing all of the images and videos discovered. Most of our validated tools have the ability for categorization. Every hash you contribute makes the next investigator's job that much easier.

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5. Find and Rescue New Victims

All of this intelligence is curated to help you with this most important step. Finding new victims is essential. By this step you likely have received training already on victim identification. If you have not, please reach out to us so that we can help get you some training. There are a lot of resources to assist investigators with this.

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6. Contribute Back

We ask all of our law enforcement partners to contribute the new hash intelligence back to the VICS Cloud service that they first downloaded from in Step 2. Your contributions make it much easier for other investigators to identify known and new victims, and to reduce their overall need to have to review everything in detail.

Remember to download updates for each new case as new intelligence is curated for you.

Please reach out to us via our contact form or help button to learn more about gaining access to VICS Hashes.