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Archive for the 'Forensic' Category
One use of the inclined plane :: Blood stain measurement as a motivation for maths and error analysis. ::
Monday Whiteboard :: The photo above shows one of today’s whiteboards as imaged using my Olympus Camedia point and shoot – the images are 1600 by 1200 pixels. I resized the image above using Photoshop Elements with bi-cubic resampling. No other adjustments have been made, the flat image is typical of this camera. A quick e-mail to ScanR.com [...] ::
Forensic ICT new version :: Just storing a draft in a convenient location ::
Simulated blood stains :: Latest results on new experiments... ::
Measuring bloodstains with Photoshop :: PhotoShop or similar image editor provides a way of measuring a scanned image accurately, but you need Pythagoras... ::
Intellectual property blog :: Lawyer in Huddesfield uses Blogger to record case law ::
Proving you own software :: Small and medium businesses don't have clear licence proof for software ::
RIPA 2000 prosecution :: How the mighty are fallen - Cliff Stanford founder of Demon Internet - receives suspended sentence for e-mail interception during argument with board members of Redbus ::
Second hand data? :: Just deleting files or even formatting a hard drive does not completely remove the data.... so who has your old hard drive or computer? ::
Zotob virus written for cash :: New virus exploiting a vulnerability in Windows was commissioned for cash - dial M for Murder arrives in cyberspace ::
Zipf’s law? :: Broadband connectivity is shared amongst users - Fair Use policies need to cap bandwidth hogs ::
AOL Spammer canned for 15 Months :: Jason Smathers who stole 90 million AoL e-mail addresses and sold them in alphabetical blocks to spammers is sent to prison for a year and a bit. He also has to pay restitution to AoL at the usual inflated level that US courts seem to impose. ::
Two security stories :: e-mails sent by naive people can be tracked to the server using information in the header, and laptops used on insecure WiFi access points can still be traced using the MAC address of the network card or wireless card. ::
Every crowd has a silver lining :: 419 scams amazingly attract 20,000 people to part with real money. ::
Sven Jaschan gets suspended sentence :: Sasser worm author gets suspended sentence from German court. ::
Xbox chipping and ELSPA :: The European Copyright Directive makes it an offence to alter games consoles so as to circumvent games copying controls. ELSPA has successfully prosecuted a case recently in the UK, and this raises issues about 'change of use' modification of platforms such as the xbox. ::
Recent History (Web security) :: It all started in May of 2001. I began getting calls from companies I had tried selling security services to in the past but were never interested. Now they needed my help because something happened. It seemed like dozens of people had their websites defaced with the words: “fu*k USA Government, fu*k PoizonBOx.” It was [...] ::
Homework: explain Open Source :: “I dont really get all this open source malarkey. Do you know some where that spells it out S L O W L Y for us clueless folk!” The homework was set by a student (who is not clueless at all by any means). Its my own fault for trying to interest people in using [...] ::
Map the Web :: The OPTE project provides views of the distribution of Internet connections and routes ::
Floppy discs in Open Access centres :: Download a handout for students on organising folders in My Computer. Saves all that stress with failing floppies. ::
SQR3 reading method :: Survey! Question! Read! Recite! Review! is a reading framework that is suggested for University students. As I find myself teaching a reading / writing based subject (Forensic ICT) to a group of sixth formers and some adults in the evening, I come up against problems with reading, summarising and writing. I have been ‘scaffolding’ complex readings [...] ::
Just Breathe (Zen of hacking?) :: Forensic ICT lesson Students searched for information about Adrian Lamo, the ‘homeless hacker’ Then we read page 3 and 4 of Marc Roger’s essay A New Hacker Taxonomy Students were invited to analyse aspects of Lamo’s ‘career’ using Rogers’ roles Disagreements! Arguments focussing on what the roles meant! Useful! Lamo’s minimalist home page provides an example of embedded hypertext – [...] ::
Information access? :: The Business School hack has highlighted issues of definition around access to information. The (US based) article in The Register by Mark Rasch reports the facts as follows… Some US business schools farm out processing of Web based applications to a third party Web company Someone identified a security hole in the system used to process the [...] ::
The Teddy :: “Teddys would be with their user for their entire lives. They would change in shape and form to match the growing sophistication and interests of the person, but each time someone got a new model Teddy, the information from the earlier version would be transferred to the new. As a result, Teddy would always retain [...] ::
Being Analog(ue) :: Don Norman is the other half of Nielsen and Norman the usability consultants. He has provided Chapter 7 of his book The Invisible Computer as a Web reading. The title of the chapter is Being Analog – which we as humans are… You can also read other chapters on the MIT Press site and [...] ::
Motivation and timescale :: Last few Drink or Die members are going through the courts – a non-profit cracking and warez ring The BBC report on the UK conviction of Alex Bell and Steven Dowd now in 2005 after raids in 2001 relating to activity in the mid 90s has me thinking about the difference in timescales in IT and [...] ::
Lycos Fightback :: Is the Lycos Fightback a distributed denial of service attack or not? Either way, it looks like Lycos have suspended their attempt to hassle the spammers for now, perhaps for fear of retaliation against users. The idea went as follows Spammers send these daft e-mails to encourage you to visit their idiotic Web sites selling enhancement products you [...] ::
How SpamAssassin works :: SpamAssassin is labelling some of my e-mail as spam. Often it gets it right, but sometimes it gets it wrong (e-mail from my own Web server forms is voted spam). A rather old but useful article on how SpamAssassin does the sums gives basic information on the multiple rule scoring approach. The gory details are on [...] ::
Disinfecting a Windows PC :: A useful article from The Register explaines what to do if your Windows PC gets infected by a virus. The article also mentions a number of free virus checkers and firewalls. I currently use AVG on the reconditioned Windows laptop – looks like time for Avast and Zone Alarm. ::
Online banking hiccup :: The BBC news story on the recent problems with the Cahoot online banking service also mentions an HCFB error where an e-mail was sent to 2,500 people in such a way that they could all see the addresses of the other recipients (CC rather than BCC). What I find interesting was that this latter e-mail hiccup [...] ::
Sans Institute :: The SANS Institute has a good Web site where you can download articles about a wide range of topics – look for the Reading Room link from the front page. There is even a 13 page tutorial on using an Apple Mac laptop running Mac OS X as a forensic analysis station – the Mac [...] ::
Decode this… :: guvf zrffntr unf orra rapbqrq hfvat gur fvzcyr vqrn bs cynpvat gur yrggref bs gur nycunorg ebhaq n qehz naq ebgngvat rnpu yrggre 13 cynprf, fb n orpbzrf z. v’yy or hfvat vg gbzbeebj jvgu fghqragf nf n fvzcyr rkrepvfr. gur fghqragf jvyy unir gb jbex va cnvef hfr n gnoyr bs crepragntr serdhrapvrf bs gur yrggref [...] ::
The Hacker Crackdown :: Bruce Sterling’s 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is still available free on the Web. Sterling had the uncommonly neat idea of reserving the digital rights to his book and putting out a free copy. As Bruce says… “The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown, and commercially the book has done well. On the other [...] ::
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bodmas.org, Keith Burnett