Pop stars, secret military officers, multinational conglomerates, police investigators and holidaymakers -- customers from all over Europe -- are coming to Ibas deep in the Norwegian heartland to ask for assistance in recovering desperately valued data thought to be lost on hard disks and other electronic storage devices.
With the Finnskogen forest to the north, Värmland's endless spruce forests to the east and the Glomma river flowing straight through the middle, Kongsvinger is not used to having the world come to ask for help. But it is a Kongsvinger company the world is now contacting when their hard disk is damaged by water, when digital evidence needs to be professionally recorded for a criminal case and when data equipment is to be discarded in a way that avoids the risk of having critical information end up in the wrong hands. Ibas AS is the world leader in the area of data recovery, data erasure and computer forensics, and is among the most mentioned Norwegian IT companies in international media.
Kongsvinger, Milan and Iraq
Milan and Hedmark are a considerable distance from each other, both in geography and temperament. But when a light aircraft crashed into the fashion metropolis' mot important financial centre, the 127-metre high Pirelli Tower, Ibas was called in to recover critical data on PCs that were seriously damaged by fire, smoke, water and impact.
When the British army needed help to scan through Saddam Hussein's computer facility in Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction, they used technology from Norway in their investigations. In Austria, Ibas' tools was also used for data recovery when central Europe was stricken by flood and the water masses caused major damage to a number of major companies' computer systems in the summer 2002.
Røyksopp, the electronica duo from Tromsø, who have been hovering at the top of the world's hit lists the past few years, have also been in desperate need of assistance from Ibas. The popular group's hard disk crashed in the summer of 2004, and they feared that large amounts of new music had been lost. Ibas was able to recover 99% of the music on the damaged hard disk. After the tragic Rocknes shipwreck, Ibas recovered data from the ship's freight and navigation system, and found that the ship was off course right before running aground just outside of Bergen.
High profile criminal cases
Ibas is not limited to working with hard disks. The technology can also be used to recover deleted text messages from SIM cards and lost holiday photographs from memory sticks. During the Knutby murder case in Sweden in the autumn 2004, Ibas recovered 13 text messages from the cell phone belonging to the nanny indicted for murder, Sara Svennson. The revelations uncovered by recovering the SMS messages were a major contributor to securing the conviction of Rev. Helge Fossmo.
During the investigation of the Stavanger robbery in the autumn 2004, Ibas discovered text messages that had been attempted deleted on a fire-damaged SIM card, which had been left behind in one of the vehicles the robbers set afire after the robbery. Computer forensics is a fast growing business for Ibas, and ensuring and analysing digital evidence is a central theme in more and more conflict situations and criminal cases.
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