Commodore 64 Confuses Austrian Police

toomanyairmiles writes, "It seems that Wolfgang Priklopil, the communications technician who kidnapped Austrian pre-teen Natascha Kampusch, relied on a Commodore 64 as his primary machine. Interestingly this is presenting some problems to the Austrian computer forensics people. Major General Gerhard Lang of the Federal Criminal Investigations Bureau told reporters it would 'complicate investigators' efforts' and would be difficult to transfer the files to modern computers 'without loss.' Could this be the latest in the criminal world's security strategy? Can we expect to see Spectrums, Archimedes, and Atari STs turning up in police investigations soon?"

Comments

Tag: Lamers

[ewhac]

Honestly. The Commodore-64 was the biggest selling computer in the world, even well after the IBM-PC came along. Expertise in this system still exists. Hell, I probably even remember enough about the C-64 filesystem format to poke around for hidden files.

Seriously: Do a block image copy of every floppy disk. Unless he mechanically modified his 1541 floppy drive (and it'll be flipping obvious if he did), a block copy will get you all possible data off the floppies. Then perform forensic analysis on the disk images. Hire a collection of old C-64 wizards to perform the analysis. Give them all identical copies of the data and have them work in isolation. Compare the results. Trust duplicated results, suspect (or re-test) single-source results.

Outside of the US, Germany/Austria was one of the largest bastions of Commodore expertise (Braunschweig, anyone?). Germany's absolutely lousy with C64-heads. It won't be hard finding them. Hell, if you're stuck, fly me out there. Mein Deutsch ist nicht so schlecht...

Schwab