#digital-forensics

#digital-forensics

Tuesday's release of video surveillance footage showing an armed, masked person at Nancy Guthrie's doorstep on the night she was abducted has raised a host of questions about why it took so long to publicly release, how it was retrieved and what it means for privacy. The process involved days of searching, the FBI said, after law enforcement initially believed the footage was lost because the camera was disconnected and Guthrie didn't have a subscription to the camera company.

Smartphones are now the most crucial source of digital evidence in solving nearly every criminal investigation, a report has found. Detectives rely on the wealth of information held on the devices in 97 per cent of cases - double the number in which data from laptops was needed. With the devices containing swathes of detailed messages, photos and location data, police chiefs told the Mail the devices had become 'a crime scene in your pocket'.

After 33 years, Bernardo Quintero decided it was time to find the person who changed his life the anonymous programmer who created a computer virus that had infected his university decades earlier. The virus, called Virus Malaga, was mostly harmless. But the challenge of defeating it sparked Quintero's passion for cybersecurity, eventually leading him to found VirusTotal, a startup that Google acquired in 2012. That acquisition brought Google's flagship European cybersecurity center to Malaga, transforming the Spanish city into a tech hub.

Memory forensics is the acquisition and analysis of a system's random access memory (RAM). It provides visibility into transient information that is otherwise absent from persistent storage. This includes kernel structures, process execution trees, loaded DLLs, active network sockets, in-memory registry hives, and injected code segments. Over the years, memory forensics has become a major plank of cybersecurity research, becoming crucial for functions such as discovering stealthy malware like or other sophisticated cyber attacks.

Details have emerged of a troubling case in which a basic engineering mistake wrecked a digital evidence investigation and led to wrongful accusations. An open judgment [PDF] published by the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which is responsible for investigating claims of British authorities illegally abusing their powers during the course of an investigation, detailed the impact on three people wrongly accused of child sex offences.

Technical experts are focusing on messages from around the time the boy disappeared

Captain Samuel White approved a search of Bartels' gear, leading to revelations of illegal activities including possession of CSAM and buying it while stationed at Guantanamo.

The discussions must be grounded in real-world cyber risk scenarios if we're to future-proof UK critical infrastructure.