Forensic Focus

Tom Heflin is the resident surveillance technician and computer forensics expert for the Augusta County Sheriff’s office, the department’s first line of defense against computer-based crimes. His primary job: Cracking open hard drives and electronic media seized by deputies to

If your vision of a high tech criminal is a lone hacker sitting in a college dorm, think again. In just a few short years, cyber crime has evolved from the domain of individuals seeking notoriety to sophisticated organized crime

Federico Biancuzzi interviews Solar Designer, creator of the popular John the Ripper password cracker. Solar Designer discusses what’s new in version 1.7, the advantages of popular cryptographic hashes, the relative speed at which many passwords can now be cracked, and

In today’s electronic environment, many high-profile cases have been solved through forensic searches of computerised media, and experienced electronic discovery professionals are now in great demand. Investigative teams should, however, remember to use electronic discovery in the context of an

The National Security Agency (NSA) visited Silicon Valley this month on the hunt for private sector technology to beef up its already formidable snooping and signals intelligence portfolio. Data mining technologies to search for connections between seemingly unrelated snippets of

Originally known as the Southeast Cyber Crime Summit, the new and improved CyberCrime Summit starts its fourth year in existence. This is due to the growth and realization that the summit reaches beyond the Southeastern U.S. The CyberCrime Summit attracts

Britain’s net industry has named the UK presidency of the EU as its villain of the year. The Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa) singled out the UK for its role in pushing for Europe-wide data retention laws. The laws, requiring

The controversial Data Retention Directive received its final seal of approval on Tuesday, when Ministers at the Justice and Home Affairs Council adopted the Directive with a qualified majority. Irish and Slovak Ministers voted against the measure. In general terms,

Be careful what you try to deny is the message from Ed Wilding, particularly if files retrieved from electronic devices have your name all over them. The forensic investigation of data held on computers, laptops, cellular telephones, PDAs and other

The Washington Post, famous for hiding the name of its Deep Throat source during the Watergate scandal, might have accidentally revealed the name of one of its sources in a less important yarn about a hacker…the article ran a doctored

In England and Wales the only qualifications required of a jury member to be eligible to appear in a court of law are that they are registered on the electoral roll, aged between 18 and 70 and have lived in

Former CA chairman and chief executive Sanjay Kumar and another CA executive obstructed justice by attempting to erase evidence from computers after the federal government began investigating accounting fraud at the software company, prosecutors say in a letter to defense

Documents tend to collect hidden data, which takes two forms. One is metadata, or data about a document, which is appended by the program, often unnoticed by the user. Then there’s data that was part of the original document but

On February 22nd, Guidance Software will host an online seminar that will explore the next generation of write block technologies. One of the first rules taught in computer investigations is to assure that the original media is not altered, and

To many privacy geeks, it’s the holy grail – a totally anonymous and secure computer so easy to use you can hand it to your grandmother and send her off on her own to the local Starbucks. That was the

When you think of crime scenes and gathering evidence, perhaps DNA and fingerprints come to mind. But there’s another science which is helping law enforcement agencies like HPD find and convict criminals. It is the growing field of forensic computing.