Slashdot Mirror
Salon On Computer Forensics
splorf writes "Salon has a
good new article on computer forensics, focusing on Lee Tydalska, a guy in Southern California who started collecting old computers and peripherals as a hobby, and now has a nice business doing data recovery from weird and obsolete media for investigators (or normal users who just need media conversion). "It hardly needs saying why this craft has grown in importance",
the article says, "but if one word sums it up, it's 'Enron-itis'". Oh yes, the #1 outfit in the field is apparently a UK firm called Vogon International. You've got to love this stuff."
Final Fantasy
Lum!
Katy!
Integration orgasm!
Will it be a star of CSI?
I was suprised to see an @Stake employee bring a Mac to a presentation, but he explained that they used Mac because the greater FireWire support meant they could do forensic imaging onto external disks a hell of alot faster.
"we can recover any data, even punch cards from a planet blown to pieces to make a path for a new hyperspace bypass"
--- sig moved for great justice.
Elagabalus
(AD 204 - AD 222)
Were the Romans quite used to learning of their emperors - among them even the mighty Trajan -having a liking for young boys, then they had evidently never had an emperor such as Elagabalus.
It appears most likely that Elagabalus was homosexual, for his interests lay clearly with men, and he seemed to have shown little desire for any of his wives. Further to this, Elagabalus seemed to bear the desire in him to be a woman. He had the hairs plucked from his body in order to appear more female, and delighted in appearing in public wearing make-up.
And he is said to have promised his physicians large sums of money if they would find away to operate on him and turn him into a woman.
At court a blond Carian slave named Hierocles acted as the emperor's 'husband'.
Accounts also point to Elagabalus enjoying to pretend being a prostitute, offering himself naked to passers by in the palace, or even prostituting himself in the taverns and brothels of Rome. Meanwhile he would often arrange it to be caught by Hierocles, who would then be expected to punish him for his behaviour with a severe beating.
"You're just scared like a little white pussy. I'll fuck you till you love me, you faggot!"
My pussy is suffering from a reeking yeast infection. I don't know what to do. My faggot boyfriend won't take me to the doctor because he says that he has to recompile his crappy Linux kernel. As you well know, compiling on a 386 with 16 MB of RAM will take an eternity. He also says that he won't go anywhere near a pussy unless it's a Penguin's. *Sigh* I guess I'll just have to go to a zoo and get him his damn penguin. That's what I get for going out with a Dirty GNU/Linux hippie.
Your Trolling Community Needs YOU! Update and re-post this article, and get the message out to the Free (as in Cheap) Software World!
This FAQ is designed to give tips on trolling on Slashdot, created in celebration of Blackout Week. It is dedicated to all hard-working trolls and crapflooders.
What are some good trolling tips?
Trolling is all about making people think you care, and so winding up those who care for real. Think of it like shooting a deer in front of an anti-hunt protester, or eating a Big Mac in front of a vegan. Here are some ideas for making your troll work:
How do I crapflood?
A crapflood is an (intentionally) content-free post. Here are some suggestions for the source of your crapflood -- remember to take care with repetition, odd characters, or repetition, to get past the lameness filter:
How do I widen pages?
A method is known and delivered to us by the beautiful Klerck which currently works in Internet Explorer alone. This will therefore ruin the browsing experience of by far the majority of Slashdot readers. Start with the text:
http://www.eveeieyhfgfcdoosammgwsnboivvbsczxlzgabc /
then repeat /ooieiabdcdjsvbkeldfogjhiyeeejkagclmieooionoepdk /
several times, remembering to avoid the compression filter trap by using different random characters.How do I karma whore?
"Karma whoring" is the practice of gaining moderation points for their own sake. It is particularly useful in techniques for defeating the moderation system. Some tips for karma whoring are:
How do I defeat the moderation system?
The moderation system is far from flawless. Here are some ways to devalue it:
How do I defeat authentication?
Don't. The FBI will arrest you for being a terrorist. Instead, make an authoritative nick like CmdrTaco (editor). The majority of people are easily fooled, and will be likely to take notice of and respond to your post, and even moderate it up. Think of it like Lunix Turvalds walking into the room -- people listen to what he has to say, and don't dare disagree.
How do I defeat the goatse link early warning system?
Simple -- use one of the many foolishly implemented redirector URLs hosted on well-known sites. Here's an innocuous recent example which pretends to link to the highly informative about.com, but in fact links to a site of the popular 90's lesbian band The Spice Girls: Informative link which will get me karma
What are some excellent sites to sneakily link to?
Mostly, you should link to gay porn. If you are reading this FAQ, you already know the URLs, so I don't need to supply them, except to say that it's almost an initiation ceremony in Slashdot trolling to link to goatse.
Administrativa
How do I justify the existence of this FAQ?
Slashdot is full of people who support unlicensed weapons ownership and dissemination of bomb creation documents -- in short, they support freedom, even when that freedom could cause harm. This document should be considered as that very freedom in action. Indeed, to disparage or moderate down this document would be un-American, and the FBI are likely to arrest you for being a terrorist.
How do I add to or change this FAQ?
Simply re-post the FAQ on Slashdot, adding an appropriate question, and incrementing the version number by 1. Before doing so, please try to ensure you have the latest version, and remember to keep this post W3C compliant!
How else can I help with the Troll and Crapflooding Cause?
Moderate this post up, re-post it, put it in your journal, and upload it on your website. Thanks!
Whatever you do, don't contact their "construction fleet". Bad things will happen. The dolphins warned me.
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
Offtopic, moded to hell for sure, but I really hate it when people use the ending -itis to signify a disease. It means an inflamation doesn't it? Since when has Enron gotten an inflamation.
R.I.P k13.find.ich.saustark.org
:(
You will be missed
where are the "Thumb drives" they promised at the end of the article?
Anyone know what they might be and how I could go about reading them them?
All you need is a handful.
Hey, I have a lot of respect for all you guys who like to eat pussy because there are too few of you out there. And I'm not the only woman who says this. Furthermore, some of you guys who are giving it the old college try are not doing too well, so maybe this little lesson will help you out. When a woman finds a man who gives good head, she's found a treasure she's not going to let go of him too quickly. This is one rare customer and she knows it. She won't even tell her girlfriends about it or that guy will become the most popular man in town. So, remember, most guys can fuck, and those who can usually do it satisfactorily, but the guy who gives good head, he's got it made.
Most women are shy about their bodies. Even if you've got the world's most gorgeous woman in bed with you, she's going to worry about how you like her body. Tell her it's beautiful, tell her which parts you like best, tell her anything, but get her to trust you enough to let you down between her legs. Now stop and look at what you see. Beautiful, isn't it?
There is nothing that makes a woman more unique than her pussy.
I know. I've seen plenty of them. They come in all different sizes, colors and shapes; some are tucked inside like a little girl's cunnie and some have thick luscious lips that come out to greet you. Some are nested in brushes of fur and others are covered with transparent fuzz. Appreciate your woman's unique qualities and tell her what makes her special. Women are a good deal more verbal than men, especially during love-making. They also respond more to verbal love, which means, the more you talk to her, the easier it will be to get her off. So all the time you're petting and stroking her beautiful pussy, talk to her about it.
Now look at it again.
Gently pull the lips apart and look at her inner lips, even lick them if you want to. Now spread the tops of her pussy up until you can find her clit. Women have clits in all different sizes, just like you guys have different sized cocks. It doesn't mean a thing as far as her capacity for orgasm. All it means is more of her is hidden underneath her foreskin.
Whenever you touch a woman's pussy, make sure your finger is wet. You can lick it or moisten it with juices from inside her. Be sure, by all means, to wet it before you touch her clit because it doesn't have any juices of its own and it's extremely sensitive. Your finger will stick to it if it's dry and that hurts. But you don't want to touch her clit anyway. You have to work up to that. Before she becomes aroused, her clit is too delicate to be handled.
Approach her pussy slowly. Women, even more so than men, love to be teased. The inner part of her thigh is her most tender spot. Lick it, kiss it, make designs on it with the tip of your tongue. Come dangerously close to her pussy, then float away. Make her anticipate it.
Now lick the crease where her leg joins her pussy. Nuzzle your face into her bush. Brush your lips over her slit without pressing down on it to further excite her. After you've done this to the point where your lady is bucking up from her seat and she's straining to get more of you closer to her, then put your lips right on top of her slit.
Kiss her, gently, then harder. Now use your tongue to separate her pussy lips and when she opens up, run your tongue up and down between the layers of pussy flesh. Gently spread her legs more with your hands. Everything you do with a woman you're about to eat must be done gently.
Tongue-fuck her. This feels divine. It also teases the hell out of her because by now she wants some attention given to her clit. Check it out. See if her clit has gotten hard enough to peek out of its covering. If so, lick it. If you can't see it, it might still be waiting for you underneath. So bring your tongue up to the top of her slit and feel for her clit. You may barely experience its presence. But even if you can't feel the tiny pearl, you can make it rise by licking the skin that covers it. Lick hard now and press into her skin.
Gently pull the pussy lips away and flick your tongue against the clit, hood covered or not. Do this quickly. This should cause her legs to shudder. When you sense she's getting up there toward orgasm, make your lips into an O and take the clit into your mouth. Start to suck gently and watch your lady's face for her reaction. If she can handle it, begin to suck harder. If she digs it, suck even harder. Go with her. If she lifts her pelvis into the air with the tension of her rising orgasm, move with her, don't fight her. Hang on, and keep your hot mouth on her clit. Don't let go. That's what she'll be saying too: 'Don't stop. Don't ever stop!'
There's a reason for that - most men stop too soon. Just like with cock sucking, this is something worth learning about and worth learning to do well. I know a man who's a lousy fuck, simply lousy, but he can eat pussy like nobody I know and he never has trouble getting a date. Girls are falling all over him.
But back to your pussy eating session...There's another thing you can do to intensify your woman's pleasure. You can finger-fuck her while she's enjoying your clit-licking talents. Before, during or after. She'll really like it. In addition to the erogenous zones surrounding her clit, a woman has another extremely sensitive area at the roof of her vagina. This is what you rub up against when you're fucking her. Well, since your cock is pretty far away from your mouth, your fingers will have to do the fucking.
Take two fingers. One is too skinny and three is too wide and therefore can't get deep enough. Make sure they're wet so you don't irritate her skin. Slide them inside, slowly at first, then a little faster. Fuck her with them rhythmically. Speed up only when she does. Listen to her breathing.
She'll let you know what to do. If you're sucking her clit and finger-fucking her at the same time, you're giving her far more stimulation than you would be giving her with your cock alone. So you can count on it that she's getting high on this. If there's any doubt, check her out for symptoms. Each woman is unique. You may have one whose nipples get hard when she's excited or only when she's having an orgasm. Your girl might flush red or begin to tremble. Get to know her symptoms and you'll be a more sensitive lover.
When she starts to have an orgasm, for heaven's sakes, don't let go of that clit. Hang in there for the duration. When she starts to come down from the first orgasm, press your tongue along the underside of the clit, leaving your lips covering the top. Move your tongue in and out of her cunt. If your fingers are inside, move them a little too, gently though, things are extremely sensitive just now.
If you play your cards right, you'll get some multiple orgasms this way. A woman stays excited for a full hour after she's had an orgasm. Do you realize the full impact of that information? The potential? One woman was clocked at 56 orgasms at one sitting. Do you know what effect you would have on a woman you gave 56 orgasms to? She'd be yours as long as you wanted her.
The last advice I have for you is this: After you've made her come, made her your slave by giving her the best head she's ever had, don't leave her alone just yet. Talk to her, stroke her body, caress her breasts. Keep making love to her quietly until she's come all the way down. A man can get off and go to sleep in the same breath and feel no remorse, no sense of loss. But a woman by nature requires some sensitivity from her lover in those first few moments after sex.
Oral sex can be the most exciting sexual experiences you can have. But it's what you make it. Take your time, practice often, pay attention to your lover's signals, and most of all, enjoy yourself.
The G-Spot
This does exist. And in over half of the women out there, it works better than anything else you can do to cause a strong, prolonged orgasm. The original name is the Grafenberg spot, after a doctor, Earnest Grafenberg, who documented the area (which may have been known by people here and there throughout history) in the fifties.
This "spot" is a small "mound" of tissue inside the vagina, between a penny and quarter in size, which responds to being pressed upon. It's almost certainly not the skenes glands, (which are located around the urethra, which is behind the G-spot area), as has been suggested by a few people. In fact, the G-Spot is the tissue in that raised area of the vagina, which has a higher concentration of sexual nerves, and produces hormones similar to those made by the male's prostate gland.
A sort of map to the area -- Imagine your lover lying on her back, legs spread. Your position is between her legs. You would slide a finger inside her vagina, palm up. With your finger straight back, middle finger is best, you would curve it toward yourself, gently, as if you were gesturing to someone to "come here". In doing so, the area you press on should be pretty near her "G-Spot" area. If you know enough to follow the urethra (the tube that leads from the bladder to where the pee comes out), along the inside of her vagina, you may feel a slight swelling (if she's excited) at the point where the g-spot is.
She must be excited, especially if either you or she is new to the g-spot, for the g-spot to have any real effect at all. It's not the ideal area for getting your lover aroused.
But when she is excited, this area (more often than not) is the best way to bring her to orgasm. You work your way back to it gradually, teasing her (typically, this works best) with your fingers, slowly and gently. It's easier to hit the right area with two fingers, but this may not be comfortable for her, depending on how "tight" she is at that moment. When you have your fingers around the right area, try gently pressing, not too quickly. The movement should be fairly rhythmic. It's typically best if you're licking her clitoris (or near it, depending on the woman) at the same time...don't make a big deal out of the "quest", this will often make her feel self-conscious, or distracted. The licking should seem to be the primary activity.
When you find the right area, she should respond by getting more excited. Most of the vagina's inside surface isn't really that sexually sensitive, believe it or not...most of the excitement of randomly inserting fingers is more psychological than from the actual stimulation.
While more complicated techniques work with some women, some of the time, the best basic technique, upon finding the g-spot, is to continue to slowly, rhythmically press on it, while licking her clitoris (for a few women, the labia (lips) are sensitive to licking, too).
This should cause her to build up to an orgasm.
A G-Spot orgasm is different (always, when it works at all) than any other kind women have. It is possible, with some women, to have different qualities and kinds of orgasms from vaginal, clitoral, anal, and even breast stimulation...but with other women, those kinds of orgasms are all pretty much the same. But the G-Spot orgasm not only feels different; it also causes her body to react in a different way.
First, it often causes a "push out" orgasm. The area around, or "above" (farther inside, that is) your fingers seems to swell up or to contract toward the opening of her vagina.
If you find the right combination of pushing back when this happens, and slacking off to let it push out, you can cause (in perhaps half of the women) her orgasm to continue happening, long after normal ones would have subsided. In some women you can even keep her at a "plateau" (raised level) of sexual excitement, like a prolonged orgasm (or a little less than one) afterward, building up to an even bigger climax.
That brings me to another important point; G-Spot orgasms sometimes causes a huge amount (relatively speaking) of lubrication (juices, wetness)...far more than even the most excited woman gets from "conventional" stimulation.
When that extra wetness combines with the push-out orgasm, you get actual ejaculation...like a guy, but much better tasting. The built up juices can shoot out in such volume that you, or she, may be afraid that she lost control of her bladder. That is (almost always) not what happened. The fear that she peed can be enhanced by the fact that the urethra is behind the g-spot, so that in rare cases the woman can sometimes get the feeling that she needs to pee, even though she does not.
In reality, in both men and women, enough sexual excitement prevents peeing, unless you try really hard. This is a built-in reflex, because urine is something of a spermicide. The "pee hard-on" that men get in the morning is partially his body taking advantage of this reflex, to keep him from accidentally wetting the bed with the urine that built up while he was sleeping.
Taste
Anyone who likes, say, coffee or beer should have no room to complain about the way most women taste. No, I don't mean it tastes like coffee or beer, genius...I mean that beer and coffee are, at best, acquired tastes...they are not naturally pleasant to a human being, no matter how much your addiction to one or both has convinced you otherwise. Most people, whether they remember it or not, had to learn to like the taste of beer/coffee, and had the desire to be Like the Adults to help them along. Well, I'd list taking pleasure in cunnilingus above drinking addictive beverages on the list of things that prove maturity. Aside from that, there's the fact that many people who give it an honest try genuinely enjoy the taste/smell.
... And this is interesting HOW?
LUNIX SUCKS!!!
Nummy!
Michael Loves Me!
Wait until Bushitis !!!!!
(You've Got To Fight For Your Right To Impeach
George W. Bush.)
As always,
Woot_spork
... now Vogon industry will be able to restore all failed poetry attempts destroyed by their authors, even if the shredded the paper into teeny bits, even if they burned it!
the #1 outfit in the field is apparently a UK firm called Vogon International
Not to be confused with these guys. Just look at those rates!
No security through obscurity: my password is goatse. Stop me before I troll again.
sPh
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-%/%| /%\
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-' \//%\
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh _,-'hhhhh \%/|%
hhhhhhhhhh _,-'hhhhh __,--
hhhhh _,-'hhhhh _,-'%(% ; %)%
hhhhh_,-'hhhhh _,-' %\%, %\
/ / ) _,-'hhhhhhhhhh'--%'
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Here's an interesting site about old computers. It has pictures of most of models. Brings back memories...
Aren't they the ones who will be destroying the earth to make room for an intergalactic highway?
Mod that baby up... up stiff! boing!!!
I LIKE LINUX AND .' `.
/( )\ /\
GETTING KICKED IN --- |a_a |
THE BALLS AND FACE \<_)__/
|\`> <
ttr \_|=='|_/
Michael Loves Me!
"Awareness of computer security as a whole is kind of on the upswing," says Laura Koetzle, an analyst with Forrester Research. "As mainstream companies get more interested in computer security and realize that they don't know very much about it, there's more of a market for it."
You would think that watching their software products get constantly infected by viruses would have brought this about?
Oh well, maybe with a heightened sense of security they might get their software patched more often or perhaps switch to an operating system that isn't such a target to script kiddies.
preloading systems with mis-directing and/or mis-incriminating evidence and planting them in places that investigators are sure to "find"
Slightly OT... /. poster a while back who opened several web e-mail accounts in the names of known criminals and terrorists. :-)
I recall reading a
He sent random crap encrypted with PGP between them all
And no, dont critisise me for doing this!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Redundant. why it's Redundant. can you say Redundant. what's Redundant. this is Redundant. oh my, Redundant. wait a minute, Redundant.
No need to go to Salon, and endure Flash ads. Here's the text:
... Anything that could store data, we could end up seeing."
Search About Salon Table Talk Advertise in Salon Investor Relations
To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser
digging
Digging for computer dirt
Collecting obsolete tape drives used to be an eccentric hobby. But now that corporate lawsuits can hinge on unearthing ancient digital data, stocking up on funky hardware is good business.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Steve Mollman
printe-mail
April 22, 2002 | Remember the KayPro computer? The Osborne? The DEC MicroVax ? The Vydec dedicated word processor with the 8-inch disk? Lee Tydlaska does. In fact, he not only remembers obsolete technologies, he collects them. What's more, he actually uses them to make money.
Tydlaska calls his collection a "museum," and that makes this 51-year-old former San Diego sheriff a curator of sorts. As sometimes happens with curators, over the years Tydlaska has begun to strangely resemble his prized collection. As he'll be the first to admit, he's old, he's peculiar, he's a bit outdated, and there are lots of younger, sharper models on the market. But he likes what he does.
Tydlaska started his museum 32 years ago, as a hobby. He says he was fascinated by the way the industry kept changing so quickly. "I was hooked on the constant state of flux, even back in the dark ages of computers," he says. "Each technology was a good idea to start, but died a sudden death." About 10 years after he started his museum, Tydlaska realized that his eclectic collection could be more than just fascinating and fun -- it could be profitable. So he created a small business.
Today, his company, Computer Conversions, plays a small but key role in recovering electronic data -- or evidence -- from damaged or overwritten backup tapes. The company also does forensics work ("I have a lot of fun with divorce cases," Tydlaska chirps) and helps people move files from old formats to newer ones, but when the client is the FBI or Deloitte & Touche, they're usually interested in the company's special skills with backup tapes, especially rare formats. (Tydlaska loves them all, but then what's not to love about the DC6150 from Emerald Products or the Jumbo 120 from Colorado Memory?)
Computer Conversions is a six-person company. Only two employees are full-time, and Tydlaska dubs one part-timer "VP of Janitorial Services." The business is run out of a five-bedroom house in El Cajon, a sleepy but pleasant suburb just east of San Diego. Tydlaska at one point had 12 employees and a high-rent office, but he decided that managing people wasn't much fun. Besides, "All my business is primarily through the mail," he says.
Computer Conversions has modest revenues. For most of the past five years, says Tydlaska, the company has brought in around a million dollars in revenue annually. Last year, like nearly everyone else, the company took a hit, falling to around $660,000. "The industry is tight now," Tydlaska says. "But we are seeing some large lawsuits."
Tydlaska may not have planned it, but his company has evolved into an important niche (or sub-niche) player in the increasingly lucrative field of "computer forensics." Textbook definition: "the science of capturing, processing, and investigating data from computers using a methodology whereby any evidence discovered is acceptable in a court of law." It hardly needs saying why this craft has grown in importance, but if one word sums it up, it's "Enron-itis."
Never mind all the paper shredding in that case; the real smoking gun will be made of ones and zeros. In a corporate world where everything is increasingly digitized, but in which equipment is also increasingly obsolete, both the industry of computer forensics and people with arcane knowledge like Lee Tydlaska are ever more important.
Tydlaska is prone to gloating about his sometimes invaluable skill. "People go into audit a company and they need to see its 'hysterical data,' as I like to call it -- 'hysterical' because of the prices they pay me to see it. They say, 'But there's nothing wrong with the tape! If I had the equipment I could restore the data myself.' And I say, you're right! If you had it, you could! But you can't buy it, and you can't reproduce it, so it's either worth my exorbitant fee or not. I mean, let the IRS believe you've got the data!"
It's not always the big accounting firms and corporate lawyers that come to Tydlaska. Sometimes it's just an individual who wants to transfer data from a five-and-a-quarter floppy to a three-and-a-half-inch disk. Tydlaska charges $15. ("I know it sounds silly," he says, "but it takes all of 15 seconds to do it.") Or Tydlaska might serve as an expert witness on data storage. ("Where else can you work two or three hours a day for a thousand dollars?") Or he might do a little computer forensics work himself ("You never want to see me walking into an office building at 8 o'clock at night.")
It's Tydlaska's arcane knowledge and vast collection of back-up tape equipment, however, that brings even other e-detectives to his door.
David Stenhouse, director of operations at Computer Forensics Inc., which specializes in the discovery of electronic evidence, is, like Tydlaska, both gumshoe and packrat: "We try to save old tape drives, old manuals, old software," he says, "because you might have to use it. I routinely go through half-price bookstores and look for old software manuals, just in case."
Sometimes, though, even Stenhouse is stumped by a particularly obscure tape format, which is when he turns to Tydlaska. Not that there isn't a little professional pride involved. "We've only contacted Lee as the result of a rare or old tape format," Stenhouse clarifies. "Most of the time we can do the work on tapes in our Seattle lab."
Tydlaska says only five or six companies in the world have his level of expertise in backup tapes. "I'm No. 4 or 5," he says. No. 1, he believes, is Gordon Stevenson, who runs Vogon International in England. "He's a certified genius," says Tydlaska. "I'm a very dim candle compared to him." In the No. 2 slot he places Ontrack Data International, a publicly traded data recovery specialist headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Ontrack has seen rapid growth in its data-collection division. Revenues went from $4,554,000 in 1999 to $8,027,000 last year. It's now being acquired by New York-based security firm Kroll for $140 million.
Kirsten Nimsger, an Ontrack attorney who consults with corporations and law firms, says the Enron case has accelerated the awareness of computer forensics. "The whole situation involving that company definitely brought the eyes of the public onto the importance of electronic communication and electronic evidence."
But Enron is not the only recent case that's increased public awareness of computer evidence. Microsoft was hammered by internal e-mails suggesting it knowingly leveraged its operating system monopoly against Netscape. And e-detectives, in a blaze of publicity, searched Chandra Levy's computer for clues to her whereabouts. Daniel Pearl's executioners were tracked down using Hotmail headers in their not-so-anonymous ransom notes. The attorney general of New York unveiled e-mails suggesting that Merrill Lynch analysts and its investment bank are not adequately separate.
"Awareness of computer security as a whole is kind of on the upswing," says Laura Koetzle, an analyst with Forrester Research. "As mainstream companies get more interested in computer security and realize that they don't know very much about it, there's more of a market for it."
Koetzle notes that corporate information technology workers don't generally have much computer forensics experience. "There's a real dearth of people who know how to do this stuff, and some of the people responsible for information security at large companies are seriously underprepared for the job."
This lack of preparation has led to greater demand for computer forensics training. "There's definitely been a pickup of interest," says Rob Lee, an instructor at the SANS Institute. A series of courses at SANS instructs students, from both corporate information technology departments and law enforcement, on how to make evidentiary copies of hard drives (never alter the original evidence, for starters) and wield tools like Guidance Software's EnCase, a user-friendly program that lets them see, categorize, and search for supposedly deleted data. (Guidance offers such courses, too.)
When it comes to litigation, companies often hire computer forensics firms. But not every investigation involves a lawsuit. "The internal investigations are a big concern for organizations," says Lee. "Most computer security incidents are still not reported to the authorities." Companies are generally too worried about tarnishing their image in front of stockholders, partners, and customers.
Lee sees more companies becoming proactive about computer forensics: "There's a trend saying that because we know there's a lot of internal incidents, you could have a high success of investigating them and thus have a direct benefit as well as overall reduction of cost."
But, says Stenhouse, "all the training in the world is not going to do you any good until you get out there on your own and do your own interpretation of the data. If you can't interpret it, if you can't explain how the data got to that location, or why it's there, or what exactly it means, then you're not doing your client any good."
Which is why companies and corporate law firms, he says, are inclined to hire e-detectives with real-life law enforcement experience. Stenhouse, for example, worked in the Secret Service, and before that was a trooper with the Washington State Patrol. "Within the past few years, most of the people who've gotten into this business have been former law enforcement," he says. "Those are the people who have been formally trained, who have the most experience in evidence preparation."
According to Forrester's Koetzle, demand for such experience will grow as companies become increasingly willing to come out of the closet with information-security incidents. She cites a recently published survey conducted by the Computer Security Institute and the San Francisco branch of the FBI that reports that 34 percent of survey respondents reported intrusions to law enforcement last year -- up from just 16 percent in 1996.
"If companies are willing to go into a lawsuit about an information security incident, they're going to need the services of folks who are skilled in evidence preparation," she observes.
Market figures for the computer forensics field are hard to come by, she says, mainly because of all the secrecy involved. But if there's a rising number of accounting scandals, corporate lawsuits and investigations by government agencies, it can only be good news for computer forensics experts.
Nimsger reasons that since the portion of communications that are created electronically is ever larger, and only a small percentage of it is printed out, the vast majority of evidence is going to exist electronically. Thus, she concludes, "every investigation and every piece of litigation in America should consider electronic evidence."
The fact that not all investigations do -- yet -- suggests growth potential for the field. Old habits die hard, and there are a lot of old attorneys. The task of "educating" them about computer forensics falls to the likes of Scott Stevens, director of business development for New Technologies Inc. "You get the litigator who's been doing things one way for 30 years and tell him, 'Don't worry about the documents on the floor. We'll find five copies on the computer, and not just the final draft but all the previous ones.' You tell him that going and getting this stuff is actually pretty straightforward, that we've got it down pretty much to a science. But the young partners relate much better to this."
Once an attorney loses a case due to electronic evidence, however, he learns fast, says Stevens. "We've won over a lot of clients by having them on the other side first," he chuckles.
Ignoring electronic evidence is becoming increasingly hard for lawyers to do. "People are creating exhibits at a breakneck pace," says Nimsger. E-mail in particular is proving to be a gold mine for litigators, as in the Microsoft case. Nimsger relates a less well-known case involving the diet drug Fen-Phen.
"There was a product liability case brought by the family of a woman who died taking the drug, and the plaintiff's attorney in that case uncovered an e-mail from somebody in the accounting office of the drug manufacturer that read, 'Do I have to look forward to spending my waning days writing checks for fat people with some silly lung problems?' It was first of all a horrible thing to say and to memorialize in writing, but clearly it was evidence against the manufacturer when the case was reckless indifference for human life."
"We've seen e-mail that's just fantastic stuff for the investigation," says Stevens. "People say things in e-mail they won't say anywhere else. It sticks around in ways that they don't understand."
Electronic data can be gotten rid of, certainly, but it's not as simple as emptying the trash, which merely moves the data to unallocated portions of the hard drive. Unless that data is overwritten as the hard drive fills up, it could sit there for years. Wiping programs, also called scrubbing utilities, will overwrite deleted data with meaningless ones and zeros, but computer forensics specialists can still detect when the data was "wiped." This could lead to problems -- like a forced settlement -- if a wiping program was used after the date at which a court order dictated the cessation of document destruction.
A scrubber will, however, usually put data beyond the reach of investigators.
"The human aspect of that, though," says Stevens, "is that generally speaking the people who are doing these things -- stealing trade secrets, committing crimes -- are far too arrogant to think they'd ever get caught. And from a practical standpoint, they don't have the time to scrub their machines every time they do something wrong. So these tracks stick around."
"Part of the difficulty of getting rid of data," says Kevin Bluml, a forensics engineer at Ontrack, "is that there's so many places it can hide." E-mails, for example, bounce between multiple servers and computers, all of which are regularly backed up, so any message is bound to leave a trail.
Bluml's job is to find incriminating data, wherever it may reside. "We see everything from floppy disks to small tapes to the old-style 24-inch reel tapes you see in the movies," he says. "Then you've got CDs, optical discs, PDAs
Occasionally a new piece of hardware comes along that initially stumps investigators. Stenhouse mentions one of the newer Thumb Drives. "There's one that requires a thumbprint onto the Thumb Drive itself. They have a pad where you actually have to put your thumb on it when you plug it in. Well, right now if you gave me one I would have to ponder how to forensically gather the data off it."
Lee Tydlaska has been pondering Thumb Drives, too. "In the porn area, where are they gonna store their pictures? Well, they can store them on these and not even have to have it in their computers. They're easily destroyed and easily overlooked."
That's the gumshoe in him talking.
But there's another side of him pondering the Thumb Drive, and indeed all kinds of new storage technologies: the museum curator. One day, he knows, all this newfangled stuff will be forgotten.
Just not by him.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Steve Mollman writes about technology and business for publications around the world.
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So, does this mean that the government will pay me to use my old Commodore64 machines (3 of em) to read all those old criminal records disk? Time to cash in!
GOD DAMNIT , MODERATE ME!
The blackout has arrived.
Who's your Daddy?
Data recovery is one of the most expensive search results on Overture that I've seen.
These guys provide a valuable if expensive service. On the other hand, companies are becoming so paranoid about liability, because of this that they have started clearing all email from servers after 3 months (mine does) Once, I got lazy about saving stuff elsewhere, and I lost my contact inforamtion for someone. I still haven't found that guy. I hope he doesn't hate me.
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
Now that we know that companies like this exist, how do you as a person who is responible for dumping old equipment ensure that your company erases sensitive data so that it cannot be recovered by anyone. You have to believe that there have to be one or two people out there who are looking to do something "bad" with the data they find on disposed computers.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
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As mainstream companies get more interested in computer security and realize that they don't know very much about it, there's more of a market for it. Naked nuns rejoiced in corporate policy eating apples of a ripe old age leaving slobbers of dung up chimney plums. Nearby, Race Horse Mary slung in hammock sifters makes goal of April saying, "So you think it's easy? This being nifty, all in polka dots? Not so easily remaindered as over- printed tomes on mundane woodworking. Pests, I'd call them pests on a needle incapable of extraneous work and highly over-valued poised like success on the verge of table tops lost to excess in scrambled chairs and lace." "Ah yes," the Doctor sighed once more, "crossed legs in haste spare no time for stethoscopes. I'd pine away 'twere it not for time and mares' legs fine as any fall weather." Just keep it away from between my legs.
"Enron-itis"? Inflamation of the Enron?
That's actually the complete opposite of what happened. Maybe you should've gone with "Enron Atrophy"
I'd be interested to hear what the Lee Tydalska has to say about secure deletion of data (i.e. how can you be sure you have destroyed data on a harddrive/cd-rom/floppy/etc). Peter Gutmann wrote a paper on how to destroy data. In the paper, he argues that by overwriting your harddrive multiple times with highly sophisticated patterns, it will be almost impossible to recover the data. I wonder if industry people agree with him.
CmdrTaco is sitting in a tree
-eating my ass
Can these guys help me recover a term paper I made on my old Coleco ADAM computer? Its on the a cassette tape. My paper was due July 1984 perhaps I can still get partial credit!
And I love him for it. Geek hobby success -- truly, qualities to aspire to...
- (Second page, first paragraph)
I've got it, you need it, now pay up! Ha!Tydlaska is prone to gloating about his sometimes invaluable skill. "People go into audit a company and they need to see its 'hysterical data,' as I like to call it -- 'hysterical' because of the prices they pay me to see it. They say, 'But there's nothing wrong with the tape! If I had the equipment I could restore the data myself.' And I say, you're right! If you had it, you could! But you can't buy it, and you can't reproduce it, so it's either worth my exorbitant fee or not. I mean, let the IRS believe you've got the data!"
I've got some old tape drives... an Exabyte 8mm, a few DAT (Wang, I think...) drives, a couple circa-1995 pre-Travan QIC plugs-into-the-floppy-controller anachronisms. I even have a one-piece combo 5¼- and 3½-inch floppy drive! Perhaps I ought to start "Joe's Cut-Rate Data Recovery and Money Removal Service."
Hmmm....
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I once had to retire a Mac LC II was the building fileserver. This thing had financials, the private records of students; you name it. I low-leveled the drive and wrote 0's to it. Once that was done, I drilled several holes through the platters. I broke the bit off the drill in the process. The drive with drill bit stub stuck in it looks like Count Datatula with a spike through his heart. We keep the spiked carcass around to show people how to make sure that sensitive data gets destroyed.
please!
Riksarkivet (National Archives of Sweden) is by law required to obtain, store and display for the public all documents and other entities produced by governmental agencies in Sweden, as well as committees and such since 1618 (some older, as well) for all future time. As the latest 30 years or so has seen a large surge in computerized documents/-ation this gives quite a few spectacular and very interesting examples of deliveries from agencies present or extinct with odd hardware requirements and zillions of different software solutions originally used, many homegrown.
Not only is the archive responsible for 'old' data, its is also responsible for migrating non-computerized material onto a computerized from for future public display, which is no easy process since there is a goal of course not to lock the information onto media, hardware or software designs that are extremely short-term.
In short, it's an area of a heck of a many problems, lots of questions, few people and little interest from the field (I mean, how interesting can it be to design excel spreadsheets for bank applications? Really?)
As for Vogon International, I'm sure that it's a company full of geniuses, but I would prefer if they answered the calls we make for ordering and requesting features promised in the manual in their software, which we need ASAP! It's no fun being stuck in a dos/windows95 edition of software for the sole reason of not getting replies from a genius/vendor.
Forensics anyone?
I love old computers too, but I lean more in the direction of the home/hobbyist computers (old Macs, Atari 8/16 bit computers, Amigas and other Commodores, etc) I found something called "The Catweasle" a while back. It plugs into an ISA slot (remember those? of course you do :) and has floppy controller ports for two drives. This thing reads *everything*. Check out the link for the full specs. Think there's a market for getting data off an Amiga 1200 disk?
The other cool "recovery" project I've seen is CAPS, which is a project to preserve exact copies of Amiga games. It's a typical abandonware project, except they are going out of their way to keep all copy protection intact. They are even going so far as to reverse engineer the copy-protection so they can make an exact copy of the original disk!
Will you give it to me real good?
Cryonics is really all about storing data for eventual recovery.
This post is protected under the DMTA (Digital Millemium Trolling Act). It is illegal to moderate it as a troll.
3.25 inch floppies? Thaz right, three and a QUARTER inch floppies? They look like 5.25 floppies shrunk down.
How about stringy floppies from the '80s?
I bet I can out-obscure this guy!
Then takes the ashes and bits in an aircraft and scatter them over a 100 mile area.
So you think that data is gone forever? Let's assume there was no van across the street studying van-eck emissions and no keyboard loggers, etc...
Chances are your email was relayed through a few servers before it got to your destination. Those web pages made it through a proxy server, a few routers, and the logs of the GET and PUT requests may have been stored, backed up, and the tapes may have been sorted on a weekly rotation schedule.
Not to mention some tapes are retired and put on the back shelf. Not all these servers were in the same building. Just how many of these tapes are there and where could they all be? Say, a word of panic gets around the company, its partners, and providers as law enforcement gets around asking questions. Darnit, this stuff keeps showing up. Where do these tapes keep coming from? Its like cleaning a dirty house, killing a cockroach, and 10 more pop up.
Electronic evidence breeds and multiplies. A networked approach to data sharing encourages information to branch out be copied countless times.
The only way to be safe is to carefully consider the method of how information is being delivered.
Why people are so afraid of "dumb" workstations that use a single server for processing is interesting. These are not just black and white terminals any more, but now have mice and color monitors. All the maintenance and information is neatly on one server. Software upgrades and projects would not expand the distribution of sensitive information in a closed system like this.
Did anyone else get a flash-based ad for MS that covered most of their browser window.
I'm just wondering how prevelent these invasive ads are in Salon.
I must admit, I was wondering if it was just a slow, groggy Monday in the US, or what... it seemed like there were a LOT fewer comments this morning, expecially ones being modded up to my +3 filter.
Then I remembered, it's the Great Slashdot Blackout week. Since I sorta-kinda agree with the organizers on principle, I'm not going to post quality comments this week... besides, at 50 Karma, I'm more afraid of being modded DOWN than up.
Hence why I am posting as AC... in all likelihood nobody is even going to read this.
So enjoy the lite week; I hope all the participants stick to their guns.
From their corp site:
"Our data conversion services ensure that companies retain total access to stored information at all times. All operating systems are supported, from legacy systems to the most recent including WIN 2000."
Wow, sounds impressive!
P
Did anyone notice this near the end of the article: "We see everything from floppy disks to small tapes to the old-style 24-inch reel tapes you see in the movies..." I used to work with those tapes and they definitely were not 24 inches in diameter! More like 24 millimeters. A tape 24 inches across would be the size of a large pizza.
I used to visit the obsoletecomputermuseum and it's a great site.
But recently i discovered http://www.old-computers.com and now i'm addicted.
This site is like a community. Everybody can add a piece to the museum, write reviews,... There are polls, links et. It's just a great site and it's al lot more updated and lively than the (olso great!) obsolutecomputermuseum.
IBAS is another company that offers data recovery.
http://www.ibas.com
These guys have some severely cool toys!
Gee, i hope they don't do poetry...
I still have 2 working Bernulli drives a 9 track tape reader(and ISA card interface) a magneto-optical drive AND to top it off a 8 inch floppy drive with a standard floppy drive interface adapter scabbed onto it.
Why? because I have made over $1000.00 over the past year alone on them. (2 jobs, data recovery)
This is why I also have other older drives that were popular 15-20 years ago.
Yes 99.7% of the time it takes up space in my heated storage room.... but all it takes is ONE person to need it and then I get big $$$. The best part is data-recovery from working media is easier now cince linux supports most every filesystem and partition known to be in popular use..
Basically, if you can get working old-stuff like that for free, GRAB IT.. but dont pay for it, that would be silly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Strong magnets don't erase floppies, zip disks, etc..
Radio Shack's Tape demagnetizer doesn't erase floppies and zip disks.
CRT Degaussing coils screw up zip disks but I can't tell whether everything is erased. So I don't trust it. I haven't tried hexdump. This coil didn't erase the floppy I tried so I don't have confidence that it will reliably erase media.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
you have to break a few eggs...
Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye need to know on Earth, besides TCP/IP.
They will never make fun of my QIC-120 tape drive mounted below my 24x burner again ..
:)
Case in point:
Friend of mine used to run a very successful BBS (gasp?! A BBS?!) in this area I helped out with. At it's peak we had 48 telephone lines, an office, and 600 or some users.
Not to bore you with the details but a partnership was formed, dissolved, and eventually he basically ran out of money.
Fast forward 5 years later:
I'm at his house on an unrelated matter. We start talking about the BBS. He mentions how he's got backups of it somewhere but they're on old 120 meg tapes. So I convince him to ransack his room (and we literally do). Eventually we come up with 5 QIC-120 tapes. What to do? Nobody owns one of these drives anymore.
Ah - but I do! Being a geek who collects old obscure, out of date hardware pays off. I slap the tape drive into my system, collect it to the floppy interface (bleck!) and proceed to load the Coloraod Restore software.
Tape 1 - Bad
Tape 2 - Bad
Tape 3 - Bad
Tape 4 - Good
I restored the data to my hard drive, burned it onto a CD-R, copied the system to another computer, tweaked the broken backup until it worked, and brought it up.
Let's do the timewarp, again - a BBS from 1997 was up in the year 2002 via telnet. I was a god among the users
Moral of the story is data mediums age faster then you think! We're only talking 1997 technology here and no one around me had the capabilities to restore it!
Skip the concrete, pour the powder right into an outgoing rip tide.
The real irony here is that Joan Feldman left her employer, Electronic Evidence Discovery, to set up shop on her own. When she did so, she took a bunch of their technology with her to get started.
EED ended up settling their lawsuit for reasons which remain murky; had they used their own specialty against her, they'd have probably gotten better results. Now EED is well behind the curve because of their reliance on out of date technology and a 90% annual personnel attrition rate. The only stability is in the front office, sales, and upper management--mostly because management grinds their people to dust and/or sacrifices a tech whenever a law firm complains about things.
Having dealt with both, Joan's company is MUCH easier to deal with, gets better results, and has a much better reputation these days.
For these purposes, you don't need a complete stream of cryptographically secure random data, you just need to make certain that the various passes are sufficiently different from each other.
/dev/urandom will do the trick, and you won't have to wait for your entropy pool to be rebuilt every few thousand bytes. Of course, it'll still take a long time (nothing can speed up that physical disk access), but you can also then let it run unattended on a machine that's disconnected from the rest of the world (and therefore isn't refilling its entropy pool through randomness)
For that,
Oh, and be certain that you do a "sync" between passes. That may not be an issue on a hard drive, but with smaller media (like, say, a zip disk), you want to make certain that the computer doesn't cache the writes.
Someday I will make money off these things
sitting in a corner.
zip 100
jaz 1 gb
pd
MO drive
soon to be DVD ram.
Maybe I'll keep my OS/2 cd's now.