Blog: Category - Reporting

This blog post is a second edition and follow-up toIntro to Report Writing for Digital Forensics., which you've taken the time to review, digest, and dissect. How the digital forensic practitioner presents digital evidence to his/her intended audience (Regardless, of why we are preparing a digital forensic report), establishes proficiency of the digital forensic examination. Let's take it even a step further, how will you present your findings? Effectively reporting what you found during your forensic examination will aid you in presenting your report and the digital evidence to whomever your intended audience will be, which ultimately may be a jury in a criminal or civil proceeding. In this blog post, we are going to tackle some more report writing issues. Remember, YMMV depending on what hat you wear in digital forensics

This week's Digital Forensic Case Leads is chock full of forensics nuggets. Links to great forensics tools for encryption detection and memory extraction, plus a how-to for breaking/auditing the OS X Keychain. You will also find an analysis of the Samsung v. Apple patent case from a digital forensics perspective, with IP Attorney Ben Langlotz. And, as our headline promises, news and analysis on the latest alleged attacks by "Anonymous" and their affiliates. Your reporter this week explains how BOTH the Anon group AND the Fed's denials, could both be true.

If you have an item you'd like to contribute to Digital Forensics Case Leads, please send it to caseleads [at symbol here] sans.org.

Tools:

• AccessData Group just released a new version of their forensics and investigation tool for mobile devices, MPE+. According the AccessData: " In addition to greatly improving mobile device investigations, MPE+ is the first

Data breaches at LinkedIn, eHarmony, and Last.fm exposed millions of account passwords, and probably other data that the attackers haven't made public. also a wealth of interesting new and updated tools. Among these are HexDive, SquirrelGripper, ShadowKit, and a Report Writing cheat sheet from Girl,Unallocated. Also worthy of particular note is Corey Harrell's Compromise Root Cause Analysis Model

This week's edition of Case Leads features updates to a popular network scanning tool and another application which may be useful in gaining access to encrypted documents. We also have an article detailing a recent attack against a website and a couple of papers that look at attack trends. There's news that hard drives could approach 60TB and a report that a popular paste site will change its approach in how it manages sensitive content.

As always, if you have an item you'd like to contribute to Digital Forensics Case Leads, please send it to caseleads@sans.org.

Tools:

• Nmap 6 has been released. In addition to improvements in web scanning, overall scanning speed and the scripting engine, this popular scanner now fully supports

A wise investigator assumes an attitude of professionally skepticism. She recognizes that any piece of evidence may not be what it seems to be, and might in the future be interpreted in a different way or be refuted by other evidence.

Consider for example one of the most famous and thorough investigations in American history. The official investigation of the 1970 shooting of Kent State students by national guardsmen concluded that a certain Terry Norman (paid FBI informant) played no role in the shooting. However, forty years later a previously-unknown tape recording of the events has surfaced, and a forensic analysis of the recording shows that someone fired a .38-caliber pistol four times, shortly before the guardsmen opened fire. Norman was known to have brandished such a pistol at that place and time. It appears that