Data Mining Project Benefits Investigators, Scares Privacy Experts

At any one time, some 750,000 pedophiles are prowling the Internet, the United Nations says. They might be lurking in chat rooms. Or swapping images of adults having sex with kids.

It's a virtual epidemic of child pornography, and to fight it, law enforcement officers from all over are converging on a cavernous building in South Florida. Here they have access to the most advanced technology for finding pedophiles.

But this isn't run by any government agency. The desks, computers, technology — all are provided free by a former drug smuggler named Hank Asher.

Called a "mad scientist'' by one employee, Asher has made a fortune collecting public records — deeds, lawsuits, voter registrations — and combining them into databases that can be invaluable in locating people. Plug a name into Accurint, Asher's best-known product, and you'll see addresses, possible relatives, licenses held.

It was Asher's technology that helped police find the Washington, D.C., snipers.

Now he is building a super computer and a database "a thousand times more powerful" than anything he has developed yet.

It's a project that worries privacy-rights advocates and other critics. They wonder if Asher's real reason for donating some of his technology to government agencies is to get access to confidential data like firearms registries, tax information, even health records — information that could be a boon to businesses and an unprecedented intrusion into the lives of millions of Americans.

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Cell Phone Forensic Technology

Justin Ogden is using cell phone forensics to help the country locate missing people and aircraft.

He's only 28 years old and a Captain with the Air Force's auxiliary Civil Air Patrol or CAP.

"Try and take the technical information provided by the cellular providers and define search areas based on that information," Ogden said.

Pretty much everyone these days has a cell phone. If it's on and you find yourself lost in the middle of no where, Ogden says he should be able to find you.

He uses cell phone towers, text messages, and maps to help locate people. That information helps Ogden, who is the only person in America using this type of technology to pinpoint locations within one square mile to a few hundred miles.

Ogden was tapped by the Air Force's Rescue Coordination Center which is based at Tyndall Air Force Base, to help assist them with their search efforts.

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Survey Finds 73 Percent of Enterprises Plan to Bring E-Discovery In-House in Response to Rise in E-Discovery Requests

Clearwell Systems, Inc., a leader in intelligent e-discovery, today announced findings from a survey conducted in partnership with analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The survey, titled "Trends in Electronic Discovery: A Market Perspective" quantifies both the rise in e-discovery and litigation over the past year. Additionally, the survey findings reinforce the need for increased enterprise readiness to manage the expected growth in volume of cases in 2010.

It has been three years since the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended with provisions centered on discovery and management of electronically stored information (ESI). In the same timeframe, the macroeconomic climate went from explosive growth to recession, forcing organizations to cut costs as quickly as possible. As companies continue to operate in cost containment or reduction mode, they are changing the way they conduct e-discovery, moving away from a primarily outsourced approach to bringing core elements of e-discovery in-house. The intersection of these two industry trends led ESG and Clearwell to survey over 100 Fortune 2000 enterprises and government agencies.

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Computer Forensics Investigator Biography - Melanie Hampton

I recover digital data from crime scenes by analyzing cell phones, desktop and laptop computers, digital cameras, hard drives, CD-ROMs and other digital devices. This data helps incriminate people who are involved with child pornography, financial crimes, homicides, drug deals and other offenses.

Unfortunately, child pornography has exploded with the use of digital cameras and file sharing, and that is what I spend a large amount of my time investigating. There are huge amounts of photos and other digital data to process involving child pornography.

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FBI Computer Forensics Labs Make a Digital Difference

A domestic terrorist. A kidnapper. A corrupt politician. An identity thief.

These are just of a few of those brought to justice with the help of the FBI's Regional Computer Forensics Laboratories (RCFLs), according to the latest RCFL annual report now available online.

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Patch the Cracks of ESI Search

Electronically stored information may be easier to search than manually searching the same amount of information. However, there are several "leaks" in this digital information search that can be costly to fix. Being aware of where information is not being found is the first step of limiting these search flaws.

Read more about the "leaks" in ESI search here.

The Pivotal Role Of Computer Forensics In Today’s Litigation

Electronically stored information (ESI) continues to take center stage in all types of litigation, from bankruptcy to tort. Author Keenen Milner discusses the critical role computer forensics experts play in collecting and preserving digital evidence.

Over the past decade or so, attorneys have come to realize that some of the most valuable evidence is found not in filing cabinets but on computers and servers. The 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which expressly made ESI subject to discovery, also reflect the growing role of digital data.

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Porn pervasive in workplace

Sharon Nelson, president of Sensei Enterprises, a Virginia-based computer forensics company said that 26 percent of companies surveyed in the first half of 2009 have fired employees for violating e-mail policies. More than 26 percent have sacked employees for violation of Internet policies.

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IT Expert's Passion for Computer Forensics

A former military policeman and IT security expert at Northern Rock is combining his talents in a data investigations business.

Andrew Maddison, who worked at Northern Rock for eight years as head of the technical security team, has launched Orbital Forensics to work with businesses and the legal profession to investigate computer and mobile phone fraud and misuse.

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Computer Attacks May Not Be From Noth Korea

Evidence has surfaced that the denial-of-service attacks that crippled dozens of U.S. and South Korean web sites last week may not have been perpetrated by North Korea, as widely surmised.

Bkis Security has just disclosed analysis showing that 166,908 botted PCs from 74 countries were used in the attacks. Commands were routed through eight control servers, tied into a master server located in the United Kingdom and running the Windows Server 2003 operating system, says Bkis research director Nguyen Minh Duc.

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Michael Jackson's Death Used To Spread Virus

The world's obsession with superstar Michael Jackson's sudden death is being exploited by a range of digital crooks who - in at least one instance - are using it to infect computers with a virus that can steal bank-account numbers and passwords.

According to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Spam Data Mine, cybercriminals are embedding the data- stealing virus in an e-mail "that claims to link you to a website that will reveal Michael Jackson's killer".

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Computer Forensics Grohttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8390894616923382391up Discovers ATM Malware

"SKULDUGGERY," says Andrew Henwood, "is a very good word to describe what this extremely advanced, cleverly written malware gets up to. We've never seen anything like it."

What he has discovered is a devious piece of criminal coding that has been quietly at work in a clutch of cash machines at banks in Russia and Ukraine. It allows a gang member to walk up to an ATM, insert a "trigger" card, and use the machine's receipt printer to produce a list of all the debit card numbers used that day, including their start and expiry dates - and their PINs. Everything needed, in fact, to clone those cards and start emptying bank accounts. In some cases, the malicious software even allows the criminal to eject the machine's banknote storage cassette into the street.

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The Ins and Outs of Cyber Warfare

Imagine a situation where a powerful country wants to annex its small neighbor, so it launches a week-long campaign of cyberattacks aimed at disrupting the financial, energy, telecom and media systems of its neighbor's biggest ally. A week later, the aggressor launches a full-scale cyberwar on its neighbor that includes air and naval defenses. With its ally's defenses weakened, the neighbor agrees to become a province of the aggressor in less than a week.

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More Files Related to Jail Suit Scrubbed from Computer

Attorneys have discovered a second batch of missing computer files related to the inquiry into former Sheriff Bill Balkwill's award of a $9 million no-bid jail contract.

Someone deleted a "significant amount of data" from a desktop used by a top executive for Armor Correctional Health Services.

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Computer Forensics Expert Warns Employers of Computer Fraud

Don't underestimate the wrath of a disgruntled ex-employee.

As the downturn forces businesses to shed jobs, employers should watch for computer sabotage by laid-off employees, says Gary Kessler, a computer forensics expert.

Just one vengeful act can cost a company thousands of dollars in repairs and lost productivity, and he said that these days it probably happens more often than many employers realize.

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Boston DA Used Computer Forensics to Capture Suspected Craigslist Killer

A medical student facing charges of murdering a masseuse he had lured to a hotel through Craigslist was linked to the slaying in part by surveillance video and computer evidence, authorities said.

Philip Markoff, 22, was due in court in Boston on Tuesday in connection with the shooting death of a New York woman at a luxury hotel in Boston on April 14 and the kidnapping and armed robbery of another masseuse April 10 who was tied up at another hotel.

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How Far is Too Far in E-Discovery?

In oral arguments last week, the Texas Supreme Court wrestled with how far courts should go in allowing electronic discovery.

In Re: Weekley Homes LP raises an issue of first impression for this state's Supreme Court: Can a trial court order one litigant in a civil suit to provide a court-appointed computer forensic expert access to its computer hard drives for mirror imaging and searching, if the opposing side pays the costs?

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Questions Surround Former Sheriff's Laptop

Three months before 11,000 files were deleted from former Sheriff Bill Balkwill's laptop, the sheriff and two top administrators signed a document saying the computer had been sent off for recycling, according to court documents made public Friday.

In November, Balkwill, Maj. Tim Carney and Information Technology director Jeffrey Feathers each signed paperwork that indicated the laptop -- a key piece of evidence in a lawsuit over a lucrative jail contract -- was "obsolete," worth only $10 and had to be scrapped.

But the laptop was never sent to the recycling yard and Carney went to Balkwill's home to retrieve it on Feb. 4 -- the same day that someone used a common Internet program to erase 11,000 files.

The revelation that Balkwill's work laptop was supposed to be recycled came amid a criminal investigation at the Sheriff's Office, where detectives are trying to find out who deleted the files.

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The Security Implications of a Computer Clock

Is the clock on every computer system in your organization set to the correct time? If your answer is no, you're not alone. According to a 2007 study by Florian Buchholz and Brett Tjaden, both professors at James Madison University in Virginia, more than a quarter of the Web servers on the Internet have their clocks off by more than 10 seconds. Making sure that computers are set with the correct time is one of those seemingly petty technical things that can unfortunately have big, negative consequences if not done properly. That's because assumptions about time and its flow permeate modern computer systems—including software, hardware and networking. This is true of desktop systems, servers, mobile devices and even embedded systems like HVAC, alarm systems and electronic doorknobs.

Buchholz and Tjaden studied Web servers because they are particularly amenable to analysis: Every time you request a page from a modern Web server, the server sends back an HTTP header called "date" which indicates the time-of-day for the server's clock. But unless your organization has made an effort to keep time in a precise and accurate way, the chances are very good that you're doing a bad job.

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Recession Affecting E-Discovery Providers

Economic belt-cinching has hit some electronic discovery firms, prompting layoffs and rumors of realignments.

Rumors of recent layoffs at i365, a Seagate Technology company, were confirmed by a spokesman who declined to provide details.

"We're not able to disclose any specific numbers about our recent realignment," said John Sun, spokesman for i365, a data retention and recovery company.

Read more at Law.com.