Issue 4 was launched at the start of the month, and we've seen significant interest in the latest issue. We believe its another great edition

1. DFM news and developments
2. Reading DFM in iBooks 1.1.2
3. Sneak Peak at DFM Survey Results
4. Cellular phone evidence: Data extraction and documentation
5. A sneak look into what's coming in Issue 5

Ok, on with the newsletter...

1. DFM news...

You asked for it, so here it is. We're updating our site to include a user-friendly technical reviews section. If you would like us to produce an unbiased view of any DF product or software, let us know. Alternatively if you would like to review some of the tools out there for us, drop us a line at DFM and we'll see what we can do.

We're also looking to expand our resources area online, so if readers want to send in their open source tools we will provide links or store them on the site, providing a great resource for us all.

Stats of the month...

• According to Cloud Security Company, Panda Security, 46% of the US SMBs became victims of cybercrime. Read more
• Chipmaker Intel paid $7.7bn (a 60% premium!) for McAfee. Read more
• In research conducted by Makerere University faculty of ICT, 25% of the respondents planned and successfully implemented a cyber crime. Read more

SANS 2010 European Digital Forensics and Incident Response Summit is back!
You can join your peers in London September 8 – 9, 2010 for the first SANS European Digital Forensics and Incident Response Summit, and hear forensics experts help you get the most out of your Forensics and Incident Response strategies operations. And because we're helping promote the Summit, we are able to offer you the opportunity to attend the European Digital Summit at a 10% savings. Full Summit and savings details can be viewed by following this link to the DFM site

If any of our readers are attending conferences or summits, we'd love to get a review of them - high points and the low ones too.

2. Reading DFM in iBooks 1.1.2
By Tony Campbell

We’ve had a lot of comments about how happy you all are with the range and quality of the journal-style articles we are publishing in DFM, however, time and time again we’re asked if we (the TR Media business team) is planning to release a version of the magazine for iPhones, iPads or other mobile devices. Well, we’ve been evaluating the various media available and firmly believe that by far the best platform for viewing DFM, other than a typical PC laptop or Mac book, is the iPad. This game-changing device is simply stunning for reading the PDF version of DFM (available to all subscribers via our Downloads section on the website - you need to be logged in to get there).

We carried out evaluations of various other devices. The pros and cons of each are listed here:

Amazon Kindle
The Amazon Kindle device is great for reading novels and newspapers and what’s really fantastic is that if you are running in the mode where you are not using the Whispernet technology (the wireless solution for downloading content from the online Amazon store over a mobile network) then power consumption is kept to an absolute minimum. You could potentially get weeks of usage out of your Kindle with just one charge. However, the e-ink technology, which is the main reason for the Kindle’s low power consumption, will not view hi-res images well. It’s ok for low-res images and text, however, in the context of DFM the content won’t appear nearly as nice. In trials it was agreed that the content in that format is so degraded from the original, especially where we have some quite complex diagrams, that it’s not a good fit at this time. We’ll keep a watchful eye on Amazon and its evolution of the Kindle but for now we are not pursing.

iPhone 4
The iPhone 4.0 is a wonderful device (and I would say that as I queued for one). It’s a sleek and sexy phone with a variety of amazing new features, such as multitasking, the stunning Retina display, hi-def video, Facetime, front and rear cameras, Folders etc. However, how does it stack up as a magazine reader? Well, it’s good enough if you have no other choice that’s for sure, and with iBooks available and other applications, such as GoodReader on the App Store, you have a good choice as to how you might read a PDF. Nevertheless, in our case DFM is an extremely rich medium, graphically speaking anyway, and this is one of our priority 1 design considerations when we scoped the product. So, we found in trials that although the content renders perfectly in iBooks and GoodReader you are continually having to zoom and pan to read even the most straightforward of articles. Taking it to the extreme, when you start to try to consume an article that’s complicated with many large diagrams or flowcharts, such as Barry Hood’s Psychosocial Forensics article from Issue 3, it was just too hard to work with.

Other Mobile Phones
The experience on other mobile devices, including a Blackberry, a Windows Mobile phone, a Palm Pre and a Nexus 1 (running Android) was much the same as the iPhone when it came to reading the magazine. They were all OK in one way or another and reading was possible on all of them. However, just like the iPhone, the more complicated of articles were hard to consume properly. We also found that the Windows devices rendered the large PDF quite slowly and seemed to lose resolution in the fonts when zoomed. We are not sure if this was a device specific problem or an OS problem but it was not a good experience.

iPad
This brings us to the iPad. First we tried reading the magazine in Safari, connecting directly from our website (www.digitalforensicsmagazine.com) to the ZMags reader we use for Digital Editions. A recent update to the ZMags server means that mobile viewers should render specific to the mobile client, however, as they have not resolved the authentication issues yet, only our free magazine sample (Issue 1) works in this way. Also, irrespective whether you like the viewer or not, it’s still slower than having the magazine locally, and it certainly won’t work when you’re at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic. So, we then tested the two applications that we’d been using on the iPhone: iBooks and GoodReader. The conclusion, both are excellent for viewing the PDF. iBooks is free, and you can drop your PDF into iTunes and simply sync up to transfer the magazine onto your iPad. This is so easy now with the introduction of version 1.1.2 that we really felt this was a good option for readers who don’t want to fork out for a third party application, such as GoodReader. However, we found that the experience with GoodReader, especially in being able to browse directly into your DFM account from within the application and download directly to the iPad, into a DFM specific folder, made the experience seamless. The page turning in both iBooks and GoodReader was nice, but the experience of reading in iBooks, we thought, was slightly better than in GoodReader.

Conclusion
In conclusion, we had a lot of fun compiling this piece of research and we hope you enjoyed our account. Really it’s up to you to decide how you want to consume your own media when you are out and about, however, without a shadow of a doubt, the preference with the DFM team is to use the iPad with iBooks 1.1.2. It’s easy to set up, very easy to synchronise with iTunes and you’ll be the envy of your friends and colleagues when you are reading your favourite magazine on such an elegant device.

Join in on LinkedIn

Digital Forensics Magazine, the leading resource for the IT Security practitioner and students, has established a LinkedIn group to help keep members of the digital forensics and security community involved and up-to-date with all forensics matters. We hope to establish a good network where we can encourage debate and keep members of the group informed of what's going on in the digital forensics arena. Join the DFM LinkedIn Group

Some of the editorial team have been running an online survey exploring attitudes of digital forensics training and qualifications. Newsletter operatives found the survey results lying on one of the desks in DFM Towers as it was being prepped for an article coming up in Issue 5 and we grabbbed it to bring you a sneak peak at some of the top level results...

When looking at how people got started in DF, 40% are self-taught and just over 30% took a degree in a related subject to get them started. Interestingly, of the new-comers to the business (i.e. less than 1 year in the profession) and those in the business over 10 years are more likely to be self-taught, perhaps indicating a lack of relevant courses in the past and a growing need for the discipline today that is forced people to adopt a 'just do it' attitude.

In line with DFM readership, the respondents were mainly from the corporate and IT security, with digital forensics consultancy and law enforcement coming close second and third respectively as the more popular roles for respondents.

Interestingly, over half the respondents had no formal digital forensics qualifications, relying on a mixture of self-taught and attending relevant courses. Two-thirds of respondents believe that some formal certification is required to further their career in digital forensics.

Over half of the respondents believed third-party or vendor training would also help them develop their careers, though nearly half had not attended such a course in the past 12 months. Of those that had attended training courses in the last year, SANS was by far the most quoted provider, giving perhaps an indication of their prominence in the market place.

When asked "Do you think there should be a recognised international qualifications framework for DF Investigators?” the response was an overwhelming 'Yes' by over 80% of respondents.

Some of the more interesting comments received when asked "What do you consider to be the major challenges facing Digital Forensics over the next 2 to 3 years" included concerns over 'the cloud' and mobile devices, in particular, the lack of standard interfaces and proprietary architecture. There were also a number of concerns over the amount of data that now has to be reviewed as part of any investigation.

When asked what some of the concerns of practitioners of digital forensics going forward, some specific comments received included:

• "Computer forensics is still not fully appreciated during the trial in criminal proceedings"
• "Lack of police and practitioner partnership, not enough cooperation between both groups"
• "Legislation both locally and internationally needs to look at digital forensics and be better defined and acted upon".
  

Got any thoughts or comments on the survey? Write to us at 360@digitalforensicsmagazine.com. Full results and in-depth analysis will be available in Issue 5 - our anniversary edition - out in November.

4. We're very happy to bring subscribers the chance to get this new white paper, Cellular phone evidence: Data extraction and documentation by Det. Cindy Murphy. Developing process for the examination of cellular phone evidence.

Recently, digital forensic examiners have seen a remarkable increase in requests to examine data from cellular phones. The examination of cellular phones and the extraction of data from the same present challenges for forensic examiners:

• The numbers of phones examined over time using a variety of tools and techniques may make it difficult for an examiner to recall the examination of a particular cell phone.
• There is an immense variety of cellular phones on the market, encompassing a array of proprietary operating systems and embedded file systems, applications, services, and peripherals.
• Cellular phones are designed to communicate with the phone network and other networks via Bluetooth, infrared and wireless (WiFi) networking. To best preserve the data on the phone it is necessary to isolate the phone from surrounding networks, which may not always be possible.
• Cellular phones employ many internal, removable and online data storage capabilities. In most cases, it is necessary to apply more than one tool in order to extract and document the desired data from the cellular phone and its storage media. In certain cases, the tools used to process cellular phones may report conflicting or erroneous information, thus, it is critical to verify the accuracy of data from cellular phones.
• While the amount of data stored by phones is still small when compared to the storage capacity of computers, the storage capacity of these devices continues to grow.
• The types of data cellular phones contain and the way they are being used are constantly evolving. With the popularity of smart phones, it is no longer sufficient to document only the phonebook, call history, text messages, photos, calendar entries, notes and media storage areas. The data from an ever-growing number of installed applications should be documented as these applications contain a wealth of information such as passwords, GPS locations and browsing history.
• The reasons for the extraction of data from cellular phones may be as varied as the techniques used to process them. Cellular phone data is often desired for intelligence purposes and the ability to process phones in the field is attractive. Sometimes though, only certain data is needed. In other cases full extraction of the embedded file system and the physical memory is necessary for a full forensic examination and potential recovery of deleted data.

Because of the above factors, the development of guidelines and processes for the extraction and documentation of data from cellular phones is extremely important.

Subscribers can login and download Cindy's excellent white paper at the DFM website Downloads section.

Cindy Murphy is a Detective with the City of Madison, WI Police Department and has been a Law Enforcement Officer since 1985. She is a certified forensic examiner (EnCE, CCFT-A, DFCP), and has been involved in computer forensics since 1999.

Save 15% on the price of annual subscriptions to Digital Forensics Magazine when you take a group subscription deal. Perfect for large teams spread around the country or world. Email us at enquiries@digitalforensicsmagazine.com for more details, or visit the site.

To 'celebrate' Back to School, Digital Forensics Magazine are offering a 20% discount for students on our online version of Digital Forensics Magazine. 

Simply email marketing@digitalforensicsmagazine.com from a valid academic email address and we'll send you back a code that will enable you to get 20% discount when you go through the checkout process from our subscription pages.

Digital Forensics Magazine is fast becoming the must-have resource for students, academics and practitioners of digital forensics the world over, so join our academic community today!

5. Coming up in in issue 5...

It's our first birthday in November - the year has flown by - and we celebreate our anniversary with a blockbusting training specail edition. Christa M Miller explores the Ideal DF Course of Study. The legend that is Rob Lee gives us a insight into DF training. We have our survey results, of course. It's not all education though and we still have the great articles and reviews you've come to expect; Lucas Donato looks at Criminal Profiling and Frazer Lewis hacks through some of the public domain anti-forensic tools. Plus competitions, letters, reviews and lots more.

Don't miss out, get your subscription at www.digitalforensicsmagazine.com

The Digital Forensics Magazine is now part of the (ISC)² CPE attribution programme for CISSP members. This allows us to grantnew, valid, subscribers 5 CPE points towards their annual CISSP accreditation. This is a great way of earning additional CPE points and gain an extremely valuable tool for learning about digital forensics and keeping bang up-to-date with DF developments, news, product reviews and events. Subscribe today and enter your (ISC)² membership number and we'll take care of the rest.

Want to reach a hightly influential, decision-makers within the IT security market with your products and services? Talk to us at marketing@digitalforensicsmagazine about advertising and other promotional opportunities with Digital Forensics Magazine.

We'd love to hear back from our readers about any matters related to digital forensics (or anything else if you are so inclined). Feel free to drop us a line at 360@digitalforensicsmagazine.com about topics you would like to see us explore within Digital Forensics Magazine...and stay tuned for our first Digital Forensics Magazine survey, where we'll be uncovering the issues facing the industry today and in the future.

Coming up in next month's newsletter...product reviews, downloads & more great offers for DFM readers, feedback from the events and lots more.

Don't forget to read about all the latest happenings at DFM Towers on our blog.