Digital Forensics

[dclamp]

Anyone have experience with digital forensics.

My current emphasis in school is digital forensics. I have a year or so before starting any concentration courses. I just started researching it and downloaded some digital forensic tools to see what I could learn on my own before I start taking courses.

Anyone have any insight?

[dilettante]

As far as I know it is a kind of overblown term for extracting information from hard drives and other media. Today it probably goes further into trying to "mine" information about an individual person's online activities as well through clever use of web search engines and screen scraping bots.

While it might go into breaking cryptography I doubt it goes very far beyond the use of brute force password crackers.

Surely you could tell us a lot more based on information about your future courses posted online?

[dclamp]

I downloaded a Forensic toolkit that is on an Ubuntu live CD. Most of the tools are mostly data integrity (copying data from drives bit by bit) and keeping case files. As well as sifting through all of the information on the drives on a bit by bit basis.

There is not a lot of information on this software, mostly because I think they want you to pay the $5,000 to go to their training. Free software, expensive to learn how to use it.

[dilettante]

Could be. I'm sure a lot of it involves trying to reconstruct "deleted" files from drives and such so perhaps sector and partial sector copying and trying to relink the pieces into the original sequence is part of it.

Software is easy to steal, training is a lot harder to make copies of. They may have good documentation that they never publish except as hard copy sold as part of their course.

It is amazing how much of the material on this topic desperately clings to "child pornography" as if it justified the jack-booted thuggery. Of course this has been the golden ticket used by law enforcement to trample privacy rights for decades now. No judge is going to deny search and seizure warrants once this magic incantation has been invoked. Just the suggestion that it might be involved seems to be enough to justify anything.

Another one often used is "copyright-protected music" and on occasion video. This seems to be a favorite source of pile-on charges.

But dealing with crime is no picnic for them either.

No wonder some people hide out in the Idaho back country in cabins with no TV set. Things are so messy all around.