Forensic Focus

Talks to discuss funding a national e-crime unit will open next week, but the Metropolitan Police Force is set to lose its second head of its e-crime unit in six months. Detective chief inspector Charlie McMurdie will meet Home Office

A new centralised police unit tasked with tackling IT crime is set to get the official go-ahead, according to a leading computer crime officer. Speaking at the SecureLondon conference, hosted by security certification firm ISC2 last week, detective sergeant Clive

Australian university students have developed a Linux-based data forensics tool to help police churn through a growing backlog of computer-related criminal investigations. The tool was developed by students from Edith Cowan University’s School of Computing and Information Sciences and will

Nato is treating the threat of cyber warfare as seriously as the risk of a missile strike, according to a senior official. A London conference was told that online espionage and internet-based terrorism now represent some of the gravest threats

An office block on a Devon industrial estate is not the most likely place to find detectives at the forefront of tackling internet-related paedophile crime. But this is the home of Devon and Cornwall Police’s Force Online Investigation team, which

The growing influence of serious and organised crime in cyberspace is the focus of representatives from business, finance, government and law enforcement agencies at next week’s sixth international e-Crime Congress in London. This year even shadow home secretary David Davis

Many stories have come to light lately about people getting caught using their computer for nefarious purposes. Possession of confidential business secrets, CP or spreadsheets to track gambling activities have gotten a wide variety of folks in hot water. How

Computer crimes reported to police are on the rise, the Philippine National Police said Saturday. According to a briefing paper on cyber crimes prepared by the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, a total of 1,843 crimes involving computers were reported

Canadian police have arrested 17 people suspected of running the country’s largest and most damaging hacker network. The Sûreté du Québec and Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested people in 12 locations in a co-ordinated series of dawn raids. The gang

Computer scientists have discovered a novel way to bypass the encryption used in programs like Microsoft’s BitLocker and Apple’s FileVault and then view the contents of supposedly secure files. In a paper (PDF) published Thursday that could prompt a rethinking

Early last year the Harbor Springs Police Department received grant money to purchase hardware and software to investigate digital crimes committed in Northern Michigan. Resident tech enthusiast at the department, officer Steve Timmons, was more than happy to take the

This month, the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), two civil liberties groups based in Northern California, filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to force the government to disclose its policies on

What if the plans to spread low-cost One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate computers to the developing world work? What if in a few years there are hundreds of millions of them out there? Many might applaud. But

Forensics is not yet a mainstream field and descriptions and definitions vary. Yet how do organisations integrate incident response, breach handling and forensic examination into a security strategy? That security strategy should be defined by policies and procedures to minimise

Although parties to litigation have a duty to preserve electronic data, they may not be required to produce the data that has been preserved. In a recently published article, Access to Computer Hard Drive Images, Fordham analyzes two decisions where

The increased use of electronic discovery has resulted in a new set of practitioners: e-discovery special masters. A special master is an officer of the court appointed to help with its proceedings, and may perform functions such as taking testimony