Issue 15 - Out now!

Here's a quick review of some of the main articles within Issue 15

Issue 15 of Digital Forensics Magazine brings new techniques and ideas to the industry. Subscribe today to ensure you get digital access, or if you want, subscribe to the print edition. Find out more at our subscriptions pages.

Here's just a few of the fantastic articles inside Issue 15...

Cryptographic Key Recovery
The past decade has seen a complete transformation in human communications. The notion of carrying around a handset to connect you to people on the other side of the world would have been dismissed as ridiculous 100 years ago. But nowadays people rely on mobile phones to communicate.

The ever-increasing media that is available poses a number of problems for investigators who have to deal with criminals that are using their mobiles to mastermind operations and carry out illegal activities. The ‘mobile explosion’ that has occurred over the last decade has meant that investigators have had to keep up with the advances in technology to stay one step ahead of the tech-savvy criminal.

Google Desktop Forensics
Over time, as the amount of data stored by the average computer user grew considerably, searching large amounts of data became a slow task that did not always return the desired results. The need for faster and more accurate searching led to the development of desktop search utilities such as Google Desktop. As Microsoft Windows improved its searching capability by including a similar indexing service, desktop search utilities were no longer needed or as popular as they once were. Google Desktop was discontinued as of September 14, 2011; it is no longer updated or supported, and is no longer available for download via Google’s website. However, existing Google Desktop installations will still function, and Google Desktop may still be downloaded (via other software download sites), and used. At this time, DC3 continues to receive cases where Google Desktop is still installed, or its artifacts have been left behind.

Fuzzing Risks in Software Tools
The residual risk of software failure after release is managed by giving the end user controls that help treat potential vulnerabilities. The most obvious is the ability of the user to refresh an application or reboot an operating system. In addition patches and upgrades are released during the life cycle of a software tool to assure the business continuity of the product. Our research question arose because of an unproven concern that bugs in software could be exploited for anti-forensic activity.

Tigerscheme Not For Profit Certification
Tiger Scheme is a not-for-profi t organization that provides industry-recognized certifi cation of specialist security practitioners. The Scheme was set up in response to a perceived need for wider recognition of the skills of technical vulnerability analysts ("penetration testers"). The existence of a skills gap in this area has been well documented, and further recognized in the UK National Cyber Security Strategy, which states a clear objective for the UK “to have the cross-cutting knowledge, skills and capabilities it needs to underpin all our cyber security objectives”.

Steganography Revealed
Along with the continual increase in the number of crimes involving computers, the amount of digital storage media to be examined has grown exponentially. In the not too distant past, the amount of digital media to be examined was measured in megabytes.

As storage technology continues to advance and the capacity of hard drives continues to increase, the amount of digital media to be examined continues to grow with no end in sight. Currently, it is not uncommon for examiners to have hundreds of gigabytes of media to examine and, in some cases, they may be confronted with terabytes of information. This is a trend that will continue to grow and eventually reach petabytes of information if it has not done so already.

Plus all the regular features, news, Robservations, our legal section and Apple Autopsy...

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