Webinar: Accelerating Investigations Using Advanced eDiscovery Techniques

Join this free webinar from Nuix to find out how to deal with large volumes of electronic evidence while balancing business demands including reduced budgets and resources, spiralling case backlogs and ever decreasing timescales.

Date: Thursday March 6, 2014
Time: 4:00pm-5:00pm GMT/11:00am-12:00pm ET
Duration: 45min + Q&A
Presenters: Paul Slater, Director of Forensic Solutions EMEA and Ady Cassidy, Director of Investigation Solution Consultancy - Global

Today, investigators face a constant battle to find the truth in ever larger, more varied and increasingly complex stores of electronic evidence. As the growing volume of data has stretched traditional forensic tools to capacity, it has become more difficult to examine everything in deep forensic detail. To improve the efficiency of investigations we need to more effectively zoom in on critical data from the outset, and then focus the time-consuming deep forensic analysis on this data only. This webinar will share workflows and techniques from the legal world of electronic discovery (eDiscovery), which typically has even larger volumes of digital evidence than found in forensic investigations.

Register now at http://info.nuix.com/InvestigationsMar62014_Registration.html

Interview with Andrew Rector, Digital Forensics Student, Bloomsburg University

Andrew, you’re currently studying Digital Forensics at Bloomsburg University. Could you tell us more about the course and what drew you to it?

Digital Forensics is the acquisition and analysis of any digital medium for the purpose of finding and reporting evidence to Government agencies, police, and/or private contractors. At Bloomsburg University we are taught first to have a low-level understanding of what we will be looking at (Binary/Hexadecimal, File System Analysis, and Windows Artifacts), and then we are taught how to use our skills to do real Forensics cases using the prevalent Digital Forensics tools (FTK, EnCase, X-Ways). What really drew me to Digital Forensics the most was the investigative mindset you have to have. When you are doing a case, it’s almost like a chess match between you and the “bad guy”. For me, that’s very exciting, every case is different, and has its own brand of excitement.

You’re also Lab Manager at the Pennsylvania Center for Digital Forensics, doing research on GPS devices and mobile telephones. How did you become interested in this area and what can you tell us about your research?

Cell phones and GPS devices were one of my first major areas of research. They interest me a lot because of the challenge they present, cell phones especially. Forensically analyzing a phone is completely different than analyzing a HDD (Hard Disk Drive). For one, the sheer volume of types of phones make it a challenge, not to mention the different operating systems on each one. Each phone is a new challenge. One of my most exciting research projects with the PACDF was the analysis of a Garmin Nuvi GPS. By analyzing the Garmin forensically, I was able to completely retrace a person’s whereabouts, down to the exact time, date, and location. It’s really very amazing the data that can be found on those types of devices...

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Forensic Software in Child Protection Cases

According to recently released statistics from ICAC, an agency whose aim is to make the internet safer for children, only 2% of reported child protection cases are investigated in the United States each year. Often the media seize every opportunity to disparage forensics organisations, child protection charities and law enforcement agencies for not coming up with more effective solutions to these cases, but the reality is that the investigation of illicit image distribution is a wide-ranging and complex area, fraught with difficulties.

Digital forensics professionals will undoubtedly come across such cases as part of their general workload. Sometimes a case will begin with an investigator specifically looking for suspicious images, whilst at other times the illicit nature of the images will be discovered in the course of an unrelated process. Regardless of the initial push, however, it is undoubtedly one of the most taxing and time-consuming parts of the job.

Internet Watch Foundation – on the frontline

The Internet Watch Foundation in the UK understands the issues around child protection investigation better than most. The IWF fields reports from the public about illicit imagery around the internet, and has been dealing with potentially criminal internet content since 1997. The organisation receives around forty thousand submissions per year, and manages to deal with around ten thousand of these...

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