forensics Archives

Tag: forensics

Will Reddit Get Its Man? New Clues Come Fast As FBI Releases Boston Suspect Photos

April 18, 2013 Paul Roberts

The collective energies of a lot of pissed off people were given focus on Thursday, after the FBI released photos and a video of two men – identified as Suspect #1 and #2 – who were identified as the only suspects in the horrific bombing of The Boston Marathon on Monday. Within hours of releasing the photos, new clues to the identities of the suspects emerged on web sites like Reddit. Astute viewers flocked to the popular website Reddit.com to crowd source clues, with a special area or “subreddit,” dubbed “findbostonbombers” created to collect tips and analysis from the sea of fervent users. Their efforts paid off in short order, as contributors identified the brand of cap worn by both suspects (the white cap worn by Suspect #2 is believed to be by Ralph Lauren, while the black cap worn by Suspect #1 is believed to be a Bridgestone golf cap […]

The New Normal: Wednesday Is DDoS Day At Citi

April 4, 2013 Paul Roberts

How common are crippling denial of service attacks aimed at Western banks? Here’s one sign: Wednesday is unofficially “DDoS day” at Citi, according to a Senior Vice President for Information Security at the financial services powerhouse. Speaking on Wednesday at an event hosted by Perdue University, Mamani Older told an audience at CERIAS 2013 that massive distributed denial of service – or DDoS – attacks have become “business as usual” for Citi, and that those launching the attacks have fallen into a predictable schedule of attacks. Hump day, she said, is Citi’s turn to fend off a torrent of Internet traffic designed to interrupt the bank’s operations and sever its connections to its customers, she said. “We should be getting hit right now,” she said. Older was speaking on a panel on the topic of “security metrics” and “security analysis.” The panel was part of CERIAS 13, an annual information security symposium […]

One Reason Security Is So Hard? Really Bad Reports.

March 29, 2013 Paul Roberts

Security is hard. Everyone knows that. The question is: why? After all, our understanding of cyber threats improves with each day. The tools we use to secure our systems have also improved over time – antivirus software, firewalls, application firewalls, intrusion detection, data leak prevention, and so on. And yet, when we look at the data, there’s not much evidence that better understanding and better tools are leading to better security. According to Jonathan Grier, an independent security consultant, the answer to the question ‘Why aren’t we getting better at stopping attacks and protecting data?’ is that we’re not doing a good job of learning from the data we have. In a conversation with The Security Ledger, Grier, the founder of Grier Forensics, said that, despite a wealth of security data, the security industry’s approach to analyzing it is immature. Grier likes working on the cutting edge of computer forensics and application security. […]

The Good News for Newtown Investigators: Destroying Hard Drives is Harder than You Think

December 18, 2012 Paul Roberts

Adam Lanza knew what he was doing. The 20 year-old man, who has been named as the killer of 27 people, including 20 children, six elementary school staff members and his own mother, deliberately destroyed the hard drives to personal computers he used before leaving his home to launch his attack on t the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The hard drives are believed to contain valuable clues to Lanza’s online activities and could help establish a motive for the otherwise senseless crime. According to reports from various news outlets, Lanza removed the hard drives and “smashed” them using what’s described as a hammer or possibly a screw driver. The drives are described as “broken into pieces.” A report on CBS quoted an unnamed source that was “working with the drives” as saying that they were “so badly damaged that authorities face a significant challenge in retrieving any data […]