The end is near… Only a nine more days until this year’s Champlain College computer forensic senior capstone projects are due. In the past few weeks however, some of them have modified and/or completely changed their projects. The good news is, they are all diligently working on something that is relevant to what they plan on doing after graduation. The …
cstick Cotton Candy – Another device for forensics to consider
We’ve all seen USB boot devices running our favorite Linux distros, but what about a standalone device that looks like a normal thumb drive that’s actually a standalone computer? Meet the csstick Cotton Candy. This device can run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich/Ubuntu operating systems and can be connected to anything with a HDMI input (TV/monitor etc) and have the ability to connect to …
Mistakes happen – Learn from them
I’ve had this blog post brewing for some time, but in light of Harlan Carvey’s “Uncertainty” post and Christa Miller’s Book Review “Uncertainty” I felt it appropriate to release it. In light of the recent press into several “mistakes” the water pump hack (that never really happened); the CarrierIQ claims that the software would “sniff” and send everything one types into an Android …
Are you a Digital Forensic / Incident Response Professor/Adjunct/Instructor?
After some good feedback from Digital Forensic Incident Response the Twitter folk, I decided to formally create the list… As most of you know, I’m a professor of Computer & Digital Forensics at Champlain College. In my former life I was a Senior Consultant for a large consulting firm. Approximately five years ago my wife and I decided that I …
New device this holiday season? How to "erase" your old one
In light of the holiday gift-giving season – I was contacted today by Jennifer Reading (@WCAX_Jennifer), a local news reporter, to give a brief interview on the topic of erasing your old electronic equipment. This topic is directly linked to preventing identify theft and inadvertently distributing personal / confidential information. Her timely article is focused on what to do with your old digital devices when you plan on …
Senator Patrick Leahy visits the Leahy Center for Digital Investigation (LCDI) at Champlain College
On Monday, November 14, 2011 Senator Patrick Leahy visited the Leahy Center for Digital Investigation. Adopted from Patrick Leahy’s website: Since 2006 Leahy has secured $1.15 million in Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance grants to provide educational and technical support to Vermont law enforcement agencies, relating to crime-solving digital enforcement issues. After receiving the grants, Champlain College invested additional college …
Emerging Science – Cyber Shadows – Rajewski Interviewed
On November 2, 2011Vermont Public Television (VPT) aired “Cyber Shadows”, an episode for there Emerging Science series which is focused on highlighting scientific and technology topics. I had the pleasure of being interviewed for this show and wanted to quickly document it here. Here is the blurb from the VPT Emerging Science website As the popularity of social media grows, so does …
Google search results going secure, what does this mean for forensics?
If you run a search on Google.com, your Internet search is likely recorded and logged in several places. Digital forensic examiners leverage this feature in digital forensic exams. Investigators can serve Google with the appropriate legal paperwork to determine a specific users searches while they were logged into Google. The latter is hard to obtain and the former is a standard …
Google offers new data source to digital forensic examiners
Google launched its new offline version of Gmail/Calendar/Docs. This means that examiners might be able to recover a local copy of Gmail artifacts easier. I look forward to see some research on this. Perhaps I can find a student or 10 to do some research in the next few weeks. Here is a direct link to the Offline Google Gmail …
Digital Forensic Course Prep – Champlain College
One of the best parts of being a professor is preparing courses before the semester begins. It’s a time to reflect on the last time you taught the course and make improvements/enhancements in the content. One of the fun projects I did last year was scoped an analysis (and created evidence) surrounding the Wikileaks case. Here was the project scope: …