BackTrack 5 Released

The BackTrack Dev team has worked in the past months on BackTrack 5, code name “revolution”. It was released to the public on May 10th. This new revision has been built from scratch, and boasts several major improvements over all

Digital Forensic Investigations: Just how good are they?

I note with interest that John Douglas (Finnbarr) is giving this talk to the BCS IRMA ( Information Risk Management and Assurance ) group. It’s certainly open to BCS members, and possibly to other affiliated organisations – worth dropping a

Cyberwar? What Cyberwar?

Cyberwar hype is inhibiting government attempts to develop an appropriate response to cybersecurity threats, say computer scientists. A heavyweight study by UK computer scientists for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concludes that it is “highly unlikely” there

RIP Sir Maurice Wilkes

The “father” of British computing, Sir Maurice Wilkes, has died at the age of 97. Sir Maurice was the designer and creator of Edsac, a computer that ran its first program in May 1949… More (The Register)

New attack bypasses virtually all AV protection

Researchers say they’ve devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender… More (The Register)

SSD tools crack passwords 100 times faster

Password-cracking tools optimised to work with SSDs have achieved speeds up to 100 times quicker than previously possible… More (The Register)

Judge: No cryptographic hash analysis without warrant

In a case that could have important implications for law enforcement investigations throughout the US, a federal judge has ruled that the cryptographic fingerprinting of suspects’ hard drives constitutes a search for purposes of the Constitution… More (The Register)

Vista Security Rendered Useless?

This week at the Black Hat Security Conference two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely bring Windows Vista to its knees. Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered

Cold Boot Attack Utilities Released At HOPE Conference

Jacob Appelbaum, one of the security researchers who worked on the cold boot attacks to recover encryption keys from memory even after reboot, has announced the release of the complete source code for the utilities at The Last HOPE in

TrueCrypt not as deniable as thought

It may not be possible after all to conceal the existence of a sensitive file on a machine. BT security expert Bruce Schneier and a group of researchers have hacked an ultra-paranoid feature in the TrueCrypt open-source disk encryption tool

Help Needed with Encrypting Virus

After discovering a new and improved virus that encrypts important files on infected machines, researchers from Kaspersky are calling on fellow security professionals to lend a hand in cracking the massive key needed to liberate the ensnared data. The call

Bletchley Park – In need of repairs

I do realise that this is slightly off topic, but for those that believe like I do that the history of our profession is important, I’d like to bring this to your attention. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/30/bletchley_park/ http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/516816 If you don’t already know,

Mobile Phone Forensics

It’s been 20 years since a UK drug dealer discovered too late the folly of keeping all his records on a Psion Organiser, helpfully providing police with names and addresses of customers and suppliers, as well as sales records. Today’s

COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor)

Microsoft has reportedly developed a USB key that allows investigators to extract forensic data from PCs. COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) comes in a USB key form factor, and was distributed to a small number of law-enforcement agencies last

iPhone Forensics Webcast

You are invited to a free live webcast: iPhone Forensics Demonstration With the iPhone quickly becoming the market leader in mobile devices, the need for law enforcement personnel to perform forensic analysis of these devices is beginning to surface. Unlike

VMWare Vulnerability

Security researchers have discovered a bug in VMware desktop virtualization applications that allows attackers to take complete control of the underlying PC, including the execution or modification of files on the host operating system. The vulnerability, which was unearthed by