forensics

Oh, what would Buffy say to this? They've finally dug up a vampire.

A skeleton of a woman with a substantial brick wedged between her jaws has been exhumed by Italian scientists.

Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence came across this sad and lonely woman when he was digging up plague victims on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in Venice. The woman probably died in the Middle Ages, a time when it was believed that "vampires" were an actual cause of the plague.

These so-called vampires did not sup on the blood of their fellow man … Read more

Most people won't have any use for this thing, but if you need to analyze evidence from a hard drive without changing its content, you'll probably be interested in the Forensic RTX.

This is the newest product from WiebeTech, the maker of the UltraDock V4 and the Drive eRazer, for the forensic field.

Basically, it's an external hard-drive enclosure that can house four 3.5-inch hard drives at a time. However, it differs from any regular external enclosure in many ways.

First, the device supports both the currently popular SATA and the older IDE interface standards. This … Read more

A new system allows investigators to boot, run, and install investigative tools to examine computers used in the commission of crimes or terrorism, without altering the contents or compromising the chain of evidence, according to the inventor.

It's common today for computers and their contents to be tagged as evidence. The problem has been how to boot and examine their contents, and still maintain "forensic soundness." Traditionally, this required painstaking hours of copying and transferring data. The result was a huge backlog in computer crime labs across the nation, while investigators waited months for forensic information to … Read more

Pornography in the workplace can pose a serious problem for employers because a significant amount of material is downloaded by employees during business hours.

The viewing of porn at work can result in lost time, creativity, productivity, and employer profitability. More importantly, it can help create a hostile work environment and can be considered sexual harassment, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Naturally, corporations want to avoid the potentially serious legal consequences and protect their bottom line.

On Sunday, Orem, Utah-based forensic-software maker Paraben plans to introduce a unique piece of enterprise software developed … Read more

A notorious Internet underground site that ceased operation last week has turned out to have been used since 2006 by the FBI as part of an elaborate sting operation.

DarkMarket was an online forum for "carders", those who buy and sell stolen identities and credit card information online. The site was recently made public with the arrest of "Chao," a Turkish criminal who allegedly stole personal information from devices mounted over the card slots and keypads of ATMs.

In a story on Monday, Wired revealed DarkMarket's primary operator "Master Splynter" to be J. … Read more

On Wednesday, HBGary announced that Andy Purdy has joined their advisory board.

Purdy, while a member of the White House, co-drafted the 2003 edition of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, then joined the Department of Homeland Security. There, he served on the tiger team that helped to form the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). He went to head both organizations and was dubbed by the media as the "cyberczar" of the United States until DHS appointed Greg Garcia as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications.

In 2006, Purdy … Read more

A while ago, I got my hands on WiebeTech's USB DriveDock V4 and was very impressed by its versatility. The device allows for quickly docking any IDE or SATA hard drive, 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch, to a computer via a USB 2.0 connection.

Today, WiebeTech introduced the Forensic UltraDock V4. The Forensic UltraDock supports all hard drives and all existing connections for external storage devices including USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. This guarantees not only the versatility but also the speed, making recovering data much faster, especially considering the ever increasing capacity of … Read more

This week, as first reported by CNET News.com, Microsoft talked publicly about COFEE, its free Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor. The company demonstrated the tool as part of a law enforcement conference held in Redmond.

COFEE is a USB drive that allows law enforcement to run more than 150 commands on a live computer system and save the results on the portable drive for later analysis. This preserves valuable information that could be lost if the computer had to be shut down and transported to a lab--files that are stored in active memory would otherwise be lost, for example. … Read more

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies recently stated that advances in technology make it possible for it to predict 4 terabyte drives on desktops by 2011.That's great if you're storing media files. It's a nightmare, however, if you're a digital forensics investigator, according to Dave Merkel, vice president of products for Mandiant. He's suggesting that to contend with advances in technology online criminal investigators such as himself may have to change the way they collect and analyze data, if only to secure any hope of an eventual prosecution.

"Something that's a continuing challenge in...… Read more