Fantasy Forensicator League

I had a thought a few days ago that I’d like to share. Please don’t take me seriously, I have no intention of starting this up, just thought it would be funny.

With Football (soccer) season just around the corner I have been bombarded with requests to join many different fantasy football leagues. While I was deleting one such email a thought entered my mind. Why not start a Fantasy Forensicator League?

The idea is quite simple, as with other fantasy leagues you’d get a certain amount of virtual cash with which to build your elite team of forensicators. You could choose, lets say, five people to be on your crack squad. Points would be awarded for various accomplishments. I thought something like the following would be awesome:

Giving a presentation – 10 points

Writing a whitepaper/blog post – 5 points

Being on a podcast – 10 points

Releasing a new piece of software – 20 points

Appearing on local radio – 15 points

Appearing on national radio – 20 points

Appearing on local TV – 20 points

Appearing on national TV – 30 points

I’m sure there are loads more. What can you think of?

Extreme Hex Jumping

Meet Martin Westman. He works for Micro Systemation (the creators of XRY and XACT). The picture below is taken from a video in which Martin attempts to perform a hex dump of a Nokia phone using Micro Systemation’s modified Panasonic toughbook that is strapped to his chest while, wait for it…

JUMPING OUT OF A FREAKING AEROPLANE!!!

I’m trying to get hold of the video and will post it as soon as I have it. But it raises several questions; Have any of you tried to do anything to liven up your day-to-day forensics work? Will this spur on more radical behaviour? What other extreme forensics can you think of?

Sometimes I Wonder

I’ve been doing Forensic 4cast for over 2 years now. In that two years I’ve always done what I think is right and appropriate for those people that enjoy listening, reading, and participating in the podcast and website. Some thing may not have gone over too well with some people (man do I wish I could share a story there…) but, for the most part I get the impression that people enjoy Forensic 4cast. I even quite enjoy the friendly banter between listeners and myself. Its good fun. What I won’t stand for, however, is people questioning my motives.

I have a day job doing forensic investigations. This is a full time job and quite demanding at times, but I’m paid well enough by Disklabs to see past the less enjoyable parts of the job and focus on the upside.

When I come home in the evenings I can often be found preparing for the next episode of the podcast, doing some research, or writing an article. Am I paid for doing any of this? No. I receive donations from time to time but these are used to sustain the podcast. I also receive items from time to time, t-shirts, software, and so on. These are sent to me by kind people that are associated with Forensic 4cast in some way.

I have poured hundreds of hours into Forensic 4cast over the last two years, none more so than with the Forensic 4cast Awards. This event is held at my own expense. It is entirely voluntary. I receive no payment of any kind for organising and hosting the event. Yes, this year SANS have been kind enough to provide a venue for this, for which I’m very grateful, and someone else has kindly offered to provide the physical awards for distribution. Let me reiterate…

I do not receive ANYTHING for this event. I do not take sponsorship, I do not take payment, I do this  for the sole purpose of giving a few hard working people, those that are the pillars of the forensic community, some much needed recognition. I completely resent any implication that I’m doing this for some ulterior motive.

Next year things will change. I’m going to get a bit more organised and get in some volunteers to assist. I’m also going to remove ‘Forensic 4cast’ from the title of the awards and call it the ‘Digital Forensic Awards’. That way people can’t complain that I’m even doing it for publicity purposes. I do this because I love doing it.

Sorry, I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew exactly what benefit there is for me in organising the awards and maintaining the podcast. As for the naysayers (and no its not Luby or Kovar) why don’t you try doing something more productive than tearing others down. Why not focus all of that energy into doing something productive and bettering the field instead of trying to pull people down? </rant>

Simon’s Faraday Experiment

Simon has recorded a short video in which he attempts to create a faraday tent on the cheap.  Will he be successful? Watch and find out.

Changes to Forensic 4cast

Greetings,

I have decided that Forensic 4cast, as a whole, could do with a bit of a makeover.  As a result the new Forensic 4cast website will be launched on January 1st 2009.

The new improved website will still have the podcast that you know and love but there will be some changes.  I have decided that, rather than just have a standard site that revolves around the podcast, the podcast will be a supplement to the site. This way breaking news stories are not hampered by time zone differences and faulty hardware.

The new site is going to be more of a digital forensic magazine offering articles, white-papers, news, interviews, and so on.

Having said that we need volunteers.  I don’t mind writing lots of articles, but I think it would be better to have a varied group of people to write articles.  I’m not after any long-term commitment, if you feel like you have something to contribute let me know.

New Episode Coming Soon

Greetings all. We’ve recorded a new episode about AccessData’s proposed acquisition. I hope to have this episode up on Monday as soon as my Mac has been repaired (again).

***EDIT***

Should have my new power supply either tomorrow or Thursday so it’ll be up by Thursday night at the latest. Sorry for the delay. I’m thinking of going back to a Sony Vaio.

Looking for Guests

There has been some significant news in the last few hours.  AccessData have launched a bid for Guidance Software.  I’m after a number of people that know about the two companies, the stock market in general, or who may have any additional insight on the matter.  I plan on doing an episode later today (around 7:30pm GMT).  Please respond via the comments or email me at lee@forensic4cast.com if you are interested.

Success

I have now completed my CCE practical phase – and passed.  I don’t know how I found the time to do it given my current case load, but I did.

Just to keep everyone updated, I’m so busy that I make bees look lazy.  I have several terabytes of data to trawl through in the next couple of weeks, so all I can do is thank you for your patience and ask that you wait just a little while longer for another episode.  There’s not a lot of news around at the moment so if anyone can think of something to talk about please let me know.

You can either comment here or you can email me at lee@forensic4cast.com.

I know you’ll cheer at this…

Not sure when the next episode will be as my voice has vanished for a few days <cue cheering>.  My kids got sick so, naturally, I got it too.  If we can find anything interesting enough to talk about we’ll put an episode up in the next couple of days.  Don’t forget to sign up for our forum here.  I redid it this last weekend so you may need to sign up again (sorry).

Repair work – Edit

I’ve finally found out what went wrong with transfering the podcast over.  A redirect on the page told iTunes to point to an invalid feed.  In order to fix this I’ve have to resubmit the podcast to iTunes and ask that the old link be removed.  How irritating.  But I’ve learned lessons from this that will help to avoid such complications in the future.

If all this stupidity hasn’t put you off listening altogether then you can re-subscribe through iTunes here.

I am also told that the new podcast link should appear on iTunes within the next 24 hours so you will be able to search for it like before.

Here’s an iTunes related question…

Why can’t I just log in to iTunes and manually change the feed rather than screwing around trying to get the feed to tell iTunes?  Surely that should be an easy feature to implement rather than going through and destrying my original podcast feed.

***UPDATE***

Also, Luby has pointed out that the RSS feeds have also taken a hit.  I didn’t even think about that.  Sorry everyone.  The new feed is http://4cast.whitfields.org/?feed=rss2 (for rss version 2).  You can also find this on the left of this page under the heading ‘RSS Feeds’.

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