Forensic 4:cast Awards 2018 – Nominations are Now Open


If you don’t know anything about the Forensic 4:cast Awards, where have you been for the past nine years?

Every year we celebrate the achievements of digital forensic investigators around the world by giving awards to those that have been deemed as worthy by their peers. There is no advisory panel, no interference in the voting process, all nominees and eventual winners are chosen by you, the DFIR community. The awards ceremony is then held at the SANS DFIR Summit in Austin, Texas. This year, the summit will be held on June 7 & 8, with classes beginning on June 9. The summit will be held at the Hilton Austin. You can find more information about the summit here (https://www.sans.org/event/digital-forensics-summit-2018). The summit is well worth attending. It is filled with excellent talks and presentations.

Today I’m happy to announce that the nominations for the 2018 Forensic 4:cast Awards are officially open. 2018 will mark the tenth iteration of the awards. You can watch last year’s Forensic 4:cast Awards here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XDxMnLYpFE).

Do you know of a person, product, or organization that helped to shape the digital forensic landscape in 2017? Did a talk, book, or blog post have a profound effect on you in 2017? If so, head over to our nominations page here (https://forensic4cast.com/forensic-4cast-awards/) and submit a nomination.

The top three nominees in each category will go through to the voting portion once nominations close on March 31, 2018. Voting will commence shortly thereafter.

You can post as many nominations as you desire, but once voting commences, you can only post one vote in each category.

This year we’ve added a new category, digital forensic resource of the year.

All of our categories are explained below:

Open Source Forensic Software of the Year

Software that has been created by the community, for the community. The source code is posted for review

Digital Forensic Blog of the Year

Forensic blogs are excellent ways of getting research and findings out into community. Do you have a go-to blog that you read every day?

Phone Forensic Hardware of the Year

The hardware that you may use for collecting or analyzing phone data.

Phone Forensic Software of the Year

The software that you use to conduct your phone investigations.

Computer Forensic Hardware of the Year

Write-blockers, All-in-one forensic units, storage units, encryption hardware.

Computer Forensic Software

The software used to conduct your forensic investigations.

Digital Forensic Book of the Year

Did you read a new DFIR book this year? If you did, consider nominating the author(s).

Digital Forensic Resource of the Year

This is the new category, so please pay attention. This is something that doesn’t quite fit into any of the other categories and has been added by request. This is an online resource, but not a blog, that helps to contribute to the community. This could be a news aggregator, a wiki, research repository, or something else.

Digital Forensic Organization of the Year

Is there a specific organization that has excelled in the last year? Be it their work in the field, teaching, products, or that their people are just plain awesome, this is the place to nominate.

Digital Forensic Investigator of the Year

Does one person stand out in your mind as having been truly exceptional this last year? Is there one person that personifies digital forensics? If so, that person may warrant a nomination.

And that’s it, so go post your nominations now and come back in early April to post your votes!


2 responses to “Forensic 4:cast Awards 2018 – Nominations are Now Open”

  1. Hi.
    Usually for best result need use other tools wich not representative here.
    Why only Celebrite and XRY ? it is garbage and not works for many devices ?

    • Hi Oleg, please review the nomination and voting processes before commenting. I have no control over who gets nominated or who wins. The forensic community decides that, I just provide the platform. If you have a problem with who gets nominated, you have the power to change it. As it happens Cellebrite and Magnet Forensics do a great deal of marketing to have their users nominate and vote. If another vendor does not, that’s their own problem.

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