Forensic Focus

Charleston’s digital detectives unearth fragile evidence, and they sift through mind-boggling amounts of data to get to it. Deleted cell phone text messages, photos hidden in strings of numeric code, logs of Web addresses. All could provide breakthroughs in a

Lenovo announced this week that it is arming its ThinkPad notebooks with the ability to fully encrypt the hard drive to bolster security. Lenovo’s latest technology move links fingerprint identity to the active directory. The fingerprint swipe recognizes 30 data

A new digital forensics center opened Thursday in Louisville, a move Kentucky law enforcement said will help them catch and prosecute criminals. The Kentucky Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory will serve as a central place for law enforcement officers to seek

As e-discovery becomes the most common method to collect evidence, court sanctions for evidence tampering get unforgiving. In a recent decision, a Massachusetts District court granted summary judgment for defendant and allowed defendant to recover costs and attorney fees when

This year in the movie “Firewall,” Harrison Ford made security engineers into heroes when he portrayed Jack Stanfield, a banking brainiac whose firewall system becomes a sticking point for a gang of ruthless baddies. Ford gets told to transfer $100

Technalign announced the new release of Frontier Forensics SECS (Secured Evidence Collection System). The new tool replaces Version XI and continues to use MEPIS Linux as the operating system base. The new SECS product will be available via Forensic Computers

A new version of libewf has been made available, with better error handling. There is basic EWF-L01 (logical evidence file) support in there, but L01 file support has been disabled because it is still experimental. The library contains no interface

Two professors in Purdue University’s College of Technology who research digital forensics recently received grants to fund projects that will make it easier for law enforcement officials to gather and evaluate potentially illegal pictures, documents or information from computers, cell

When bringing an offence committed involving a digital device such as a computer before the criminal court system of England and Wales a strategy must be drawn up by the prosecution to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the defendant

Rule 37(f), one of the key changes in the upcoming electronic-data discovery (EDD) amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, helps define what steps a party must take to preserve potentially discoverable electronically stored information (ESI) within an electronic

London’s Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit (CCU) has launched an investigation into how data containing personal information from the UK ended up on a computer in the US. “We believe the data has been stolen with the use of a

A recent study of Justice Department prosecutions suggests that authentication of devices—not just people—when logging into privileged accounts could go a long way toward securing sensitive data. Most of the cases reviewed involved outsiders who logged on with stolen identifications

Barrel-chested and bearded, Gregg Gunsch stood before the class with the ramrod bearing of a soldier, rather than a computer geek. “We are expecting our information systems to be under attack,” said Mr. Gunsch, an associate professor at Defiance College.

While most local police departments are dealing with reports of cyber crimes, the vast majority say they lack money and training needed to combat it, according to a newly released survey. Cyber threats and crimes against children, identity theft and

Tony Pallone is an examiner in the Pittsburgh FBI office’s computer forensics lab. The operation is a small-scale version of the FBI’s 10 multiagency Regional Computer Forensics Laboratories (RCFLs); two more are slated to open this year. The FBI provides

The United States is now a party to the Council of Europe (COE) Convention on Cybercrime, the only multilateral treaty that specifically addresses the problem of computer-related crime and electronic evidence gathering, the White House has announced. The convention requires