UK crime fighters grapple with iPhone wipe threat

Criminals can remotely destroy incriminating evidence by exploiting security features on devices such as the Apple iPhone, a leading digital forensics expert has warned. The head of the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office digital forensics unit, Keith Foggon, cautioned that the

Police probe cell phones to thwart criminals

Deep in the bowels of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, Sgt. Wayne Hom plugs in a USB key to activate a new high-tech tool that has become the delight of cops, the bane of bad guys and a cloud over

Hong Kong police gets Cofee boost

A police officer arrives at the scene of a murder, plugs a thumbdrive into a computer that is still running, and executes some 150 evidence-gathering commands within 15 minutes. A scene from CSI? Not necessarily. The Hong Kong Police Force’s

Indian forensic lab braces up to tackle cyber crimes

With the rising trend of cyber crimes in Assam, the State Forensic Science Laboratory (SFL) is equipping itself with state-of-the-art equipment to help the law enforcing agencies from across the Northeast to crack down on cyber criminals. The FSL will

Gallery: Tools for CSI cybercrime

The digital forensics unit (DFU) of the Australia Serious Fraud Office sniffs out incriminating evidence from crime scenes with ZDNet Australia on hand collecting clues. Armed with laptops and suitcases containing specialist forensic tools the 21-strong team can swiftly capture

Computer Issues When Key Personnel Defect

My firm provides digital forensics and e-discovery services. Most of our digital forensics investigations and analyses involve employees who have left their former employers for a rival or to start their own business. Our investigations focus on a constellation of

RevEnge hex viewer

RevEnge is a fully featured hex viewer designed with Reverse Engineering in mind (hence the name). It comes with features not seen in other Hex viewers such as its ability to perform on the fly decompression of ZLib compressed data,

A forum for fraudsters

In the last few days, I’ve entered a whole new web world. It’s a place where people speak of getting “dumps… sniffed from ATMs” or using “blinds to cash out” or getting data through “rj 45 taps.” The language belongs

Do RIAA Snoops Need PI Licenses?

By now, we all know how the Recording Industry Association of America nabs alleged file sharers, more than 20,000 lawsuits and counting: Hired snoops from MediaSentry – aka SafeNet – log onto Kazaa, Limewire or other file sharing programs, peer

Thoughts on Virtualization Forensics

Acquiring disks is a very important part of digital forensics. In my past blogs I discussed some aspects of forensics with respect to VMware ESX servers. This is the last part of the series. To acquire a VM from a

Moving ESI as Real Evidence

John Simek, a computer forensic examiner in Fairfax, Va., recently had a woman come to his office after a divorce proceeding. In court, her husband had presented some mean-spirited e-mails she supposedly sent him from a free Hotmail e-mail account,

Forensic Focus LinkedIn group

A new LinkedIn group for Forensic Focus members and the wider computer forensics community has been launched. The group’s homepage can be accessed at http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/693917 If you would like to expand your professional network please consider joining!

Black Hat 2008 Aftermath

As always, the 2008 Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas was full of cutting-edge computer security research, the latest in computer security vulnerabilities, and more than a little controversy. Since the beginning of the Black Hat conference 15 years

UK computer forensics firm opens mobile phone lab

Computer forensics firm CY4OR, which helps police to crack criminal cases, has opened a mobile phone laboratory at its Bury headquarters as it looks to expand. The company, founded by Joel Tobias in 2002, has seen turnover double to £1.3m

Meet A-Z: The computer hacker behind a cybercrime wave

He goes by the nickname A-Z and is one of Russia’s bright young tech stars. He’s a crack programmer, successful entrepreneur and creator of sophisticated software tools that help his customers make millions. Trouble is, A-Z’s masterstroke is a computer