National Computer Forensics Institute: Demystifying cybercrime By Michael Kassner in IT Security, October 7, 2013, 10:56 AM PST
Knowing how to handle digital evidence and discovery correctly prevents costly mistakes. A federal facility in Birmingham, Alabama is working hard to improve that situation.
Birmingham, Alabama has a certain appeal for those of us living in the northern part of the country, especially this time of year when one day we could be looking at tornadoes, and the next thirty plus inches of snow.
I learned something else during my trip to Birmingham. The city has a propensity for digital crime fighting. Facebook learned this firsthand when staff and students in the university’s computer-forensic program played a significant role in determining the key players behind Koobface, a computer worm that stole millions of dollars from Facebook members.
Digital crime-fighting efforts in Birmingham do not stop there; drive south from downtown Birmingham on Highway 65 to the sprawling suburb of Hoover. Exit on Valleydale Road, and before long, a well-kept modern-looking building appears on the right.
Figure A
Once inside, the reason we stopped at this particular location became apparent—The National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI)—another Birmingham organization that’s making life difficult for computer savvy criminals.
Figure B
Barry Page, NCFI Deputy Director, met our group at the institute’s imposing double doors and acted as our tour guide for the facility. “The purpose of NCFI is simple; get state and local officials from across the country up to speed on the proper handling of digital evidence, cybercrime investigations, and judicial procedures related to digital crime.”
In addition to Page's explanation, the official NCFI mandate states: “[T]o provide state and local law enforcement, legal, and judicial professionals a free, comprehensive education on current cybercrime trends, investigative methods, and prosecutorial and judicial challenges.”
Page then pointed out that the United States Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division and the Alabama Office of Prosecution Services jointly run NCFI—the only training facility of its kind in the United States, which has been in operation since 2008. 2600 students from more than 500 agencies have taken classes there already.
Digital evidence training for the legal profession and law enforcement
NCFI has three multipurpose classrooms, two network investigation classrooms, a mock courtroom, and an operational forensics lab dedicated to the Birmingham Electronics Crimes Task Force. NCFI offers thirteen classes under the following categories:
Deadbox Forensics
Network Intrusion
Mobile Device and Social Networking Examination
A member of the tour asked about equipment. Page said NCFI considers it important for agencies to standardize on equipment and methodology as a way to enhance cross communications and eliminate mistakes. To that end, each student receives a Forensic Recovery Device and notebook. Software is dependent upon the student’s class—for example, students enrolled in Deadbox Forensics would receive Encase and WriteBlocker.
Next, we moved past three packed classrooms on our way to the mock courtroom. As we entered, Page said besides being Deputy Director of NCFI, he is an Alabama state prosecutor. So, he works closely with the instructors teaching the Computer Forensics in Court classes.
The following points are addressed during the judge’s class:
Understand the significance of how data is stored on computers
Understand the base differences between popular operating systems
Understand the role that the Internet and networks play in computer crimes
Understand the entire forensic process performed by investigators
Better understand legal obstacles present in computer crimes
Understand how to better evaluate computer crime cases in court
Figure C
Page also pointed out the mock courtroom, which is designed to accommodate digital discovery so as not to break the chain of custody, yet still guarantee a fair and impartial hearing. For that reason alone, the courtroom itself receives significant attention from people wanting to incorporate similar features into their courtrooms.
As we left the mock courtroom, I asked what defense attorneys do to stay current. Page explained that defense lawyers most often specialize. And since people accused of a crime get to pick their defense attorney, they will more than likely retain an attorney experienced in litigating cases involving digital evidence.
But, unfortunately, assigning cases involving digital evidence and or digital crime to prosecutors or judges with experience is not always an option. So, the logical approach is to provide a way similar to NCFI for prosecutors and judges to become familiar with court procedures involving digital crime and digital evidence.
Final thoughts
The university’s computer forensics team includes an archeologist and psychologist. The team has an enviable string of successes including eliminating Koobface. The NCFI promotes a similar ideology to normally non-cooperating legal entities. They also are showing positive results from their effort. I see a common thread—that of getting normally disparate groups talking and working together to solve big issues.
If I may, I would like to take a moment to thank all of you who have emailed your kind condolences on the passing of my father. The messages are much appreciated.
[All images courtesy of the NCFI.]
About Michael Kassner
Michael Kassner is currently a systems manager for an international company. Together with his son, he runs MKassner Net, a small IT publication consultancy.
In 1984 Mike Lazaridis, an engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and Douglas Fregin, an engineering student at the University of Windsor, founded an electronics and computer science consulting company called Research In Motion, or RIM. For years the company tinkered in obscurity, until it focused on a breakthrough technology: an easy, secure, and effective device that allowed workers to send and receive e-mails while away from the office. They called it the BlackBerry.
RIM grew into one of the world’s most valuable tech companies. The BlackBerry became the indispensable accessory of business executives, heads of state, and Hollywood celebrities—until iPhone and Android came along and spoiled the party. Today the company, which has been renamed, simply, BlackBerry (BBRY), is burning through cash as sales keep falling. On Nov. 21, BlackBerry shares closed at just above $6, the lowest it’s been in almost 15 years.
Over the last two months, Bloomberg Businessweek spoke to dozens of current and former BlackBerry employees, vendors, and associates. Here is their account of the thrill of BlackBerry’s ascension—and the heartache of watching its demise.
Gary Mousseau, eighth employee at RIM and software developer and manager, 1991-2007: I first met Mike Lazaridis when he interviewed me. Mike is a very good orator and communicator of technology. He was a convincing-enough soul that I ended up taking a 13 percent pay cut to join RIM. I started in 1991. My first job was to build my own desk. There was no more room for me. They put me in the fax reception area. I was the guy receiving packages. I sat beside the fax machine, which was not fun. It was a small place. It was crowded. We were above a pizza joint.
In 1992, Chief Executive Officer Lazaridis hires Jim Balsillie, a Harvard Business School graduate, to help manage the cash-strapped business. Balsillie takes out a second mortgage and invests $250,000 in return for a one-third stake and soon becomes co-CEO. (Balsillie and Lazaridis declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Aaron Harris/CP Photo/AP
Patrick Spence, senior vice president and managing director for global sales and marketing, 1998-2012: Jim was really strategic in terms of how he was thinking and really ambitious in terms of what we wanted to do. You don’t meet many Canadians that are ambitious in that kind of way.
Mousseau: We were creating all these random products over wireless, [but] none of them had all the dominoes in place to really succeed. They were just interesting. Mike is an electrical engineer. That was his forte, his love. We eventually decided to replace a very large bulky radio modem that IBM (IBM) used for [basic personal communication] service. This was the
RIM 900. It was a clamshell device. Some would affectionately call it the bullfrog. We sold a lot of them.
Jim Estill, member of the board, 1997-2010: In the early days at RIM, people had no idea what a smartphone was. People had no idea what two-way pagers were. But they had such a cool factor. You’d take one out, and everybody would want to touch it and play with it and see what it was.
Mousseau: Mike and I and a few others got obsessed with auto-forwarding our Exchange mailbox messages to our belts. But at that time you couldn’t reply to anything. So one day, Mike came in and said he had decided to nix all the 30 software projects that we were spinning our wheels on. He said, “We’re going to create a solution to this two-mailbox problem.”
RIM goes public in 1997, listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange; shares would begin trading on Nasdaq two years later. Balsillie establishes “the doughnut rule,” in which employees caught talking about the share price would have to buy doughnuts for everyone at the company. The following year the company releases the RIM 950 wireless device, featuring a miniature qwerty keyboard.
Bruce Poon Tip, Canadian entrepreneur, founder of G Adventures: I was part of a group called the Innovators Alliance. Jim [Balsillie] came in and held up this prototype that was in the shape of a blackberry. It was dark blue and had grooves where the keys would be. When he said, “It’s called a BlackBerry,” people started rolling their eyes. They thought it was a stupid name. This was the height of the dot-com boom. He had this dream of people getting e-mails on the move, and the feeling at the time was, “Why would anyone want their e-mails away from the office?”
Julia Test, a 28-year-old freelance photographer, can’t stop checking Facebook (FB). Her last relationship failed partly because she and her ex kept fighting over texts instead of talking things out in person. “It wasn’t a long-distance relationship or anything,” she says. “It’s just easier to say something mean in a text than watching someone’s face when you say it.” Jen McDowell, a director of entertainment at the travel company Olivia, says her bosses have told her she’s too tethered to her job. “I never took vacation,” she says. “Finally, they came to me and said, ‘We’ll have legal problems if you don’t take at least three days off. Please leave.’ ” A woman named Monika, who says only that she works for “a very large company in Redmond, Wash.,” also never takes vacation.
Unfortunately for her, her bosses are fine with that.
This isn’t a group therapy session. It’s Digital Detox, a three-day retreat at Shambhalah Ranch in Northern California for people who feel addicted to their gadgets. For 72 hours, the 11 participants, who’ve paid from $595 for a twin bed to $1,400 for a suite, eat vegan food, practice yoga, swim in a nearby creek, take long walks in the woods, and keep a journal about being offline. (Typewriters are available for anyone not used to longhand.) The ranch is two-and-a-half hours north of San Francisco, so most guests come from the Bay Area, although a few have flown in from Seattle and New York.
They’re here for a variety of reasons—bad breakups, career troubles—but there’s one thing everyone has in common: They’re driven to distraction by the Internet.
Isn’t everyone? Checking e-mail in the bathroom and sleeping with your cell phone by your bed are now considered normal. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2007 only 58 percent of people used their phones to text; last year it was 80 percent. More than half of all cell phone users have smartphones, giving them Internet access all the time. As a result, the number of hours Americans spend collectively online has almost doubled since 2010, according to ComScore (SCOR), a digital analytics company. Teens and twentysomethings are the most wired. In 2011, Diana Rehling and Wendy Bjorklund, communications professors at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, surveyed their undergraduates and found that the average college student checks Facebook 20 times an hour.
Some are starting to rebel against this constant compulsion to connect. Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, an advocate of unplugging, self-corrects by instituting one technology-free day each week. “It’s the slowest day in the world,” she says. Shlain lectures frequently about the benefits of her “technology shabbats.” Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self and the author of Alone Together, which explores the way the Internet constrains offline relationships, has also observed this shift. “I don’t want to say it’s a movement just yet, but it does seem like a lot of people have gotten to the point with technology where common sense is starting to kick in,” she says. “We’ve finally realized that we have to start making healthier choices.”
That’s what happened to Digital Detox’s co-founder, Levi Felix. In 2009, Felix, now 29, was a vice president at a Los Angeles Internet startup, Causecast, working 80 hours a week and sleeping with his cell phone under his pillow. He was diagnosed with an esophageal tear that doctors told him was “related to too much stress, too much coffee, too much work, and too much Thai takeout.” So he and his girlfriend, Brooke Dean, quit their jobs and traveled the world for nine months, eventually landing at a communal farm in Cambodia. When they returned, they noticed their friends had grown even more attached to social media. “I couldn’t figure out why people were staring down at their phones all the time,” Felix says. He read Turkle’s Alone Together and came up with the idea of Digital Detox.
Felix and Dean hosted the first retreat in June 2012. Since then their venture has grown to a series of vacation-esque unplugging seminars in places such as Costa Rica and Cambodia. Earlier this year they hosted an adult summer camp where 300 professionals made lanyards and performed talent show routines. The program’s core remains small, 10- to 15-person retreats in the redwoods. Digital Detox feels kind of like a camping trip with some particularly touchy-feely California friends.
Minus the pot. There’s not even alcohol or coffee, just some weak black tea to stave off caffeine headaches. When guests arrive, Felix takes their digital devices and stores them in paper bags, along with any watches and clocks. Shambhalah Ranch is surrounded by redwoods—at one point, participants actually hug a tree—but since cameras are gadgets, detoxers aren’t allowed to take pictures. When they want to remember an experience, they make a square with their thumbs and index fingers, bring it up to their eyes, and say, “Click!” They’re ordinarily forbidden from discussing ages or jobs (exceptions are made for nosy reporters). That way everyone from the recent college grad to the company executive will feel as if he’s among peers.
On the second day of Digital Detox, Anna Trautman, a quality-control lab assistant at Gordon Biersch Brewing, spends several hours sitting quietly by a lake contemplating whether she has the guts to quit her job and travel alone. “I’d never make the time to sit and think about this if I had my phone,” she says later that night. “I would’ve just spent hours looking at strangers’ photos on Instagram instead.”
“It feels like the 1990s again!” says Laura Monfredini, 39, an in-house lawyer for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “Things were so much slower back then. I used to be able to read a whole book at a time. Now I can only do one or two chapters before I think, Oh, what’s on Facebook?” While Monfredini appreciates getting her attention span back, she’s not sure that reverting to a pre-Web lifestyle is better. The Internet makes our lives more convenient, she argues.
She’s not the only one struggling to live without technology, even for just a few days. One attendee keeps feeling phantom cell phone vibrations. Another misses texting her best friend. Monika from Washington has the hardest time: She spends the weekend making a mental list of things she wants to Google when she gets back online. Still, she and everyone else say they end the weekend refreshed. “You know when a computer is on too long, and it starts overheating and making those whirring noises?” says Evan Kleiman, who works in business development and lives in Los Angeles. “I feel like my brain had been doing that. This weekend I finally managed to turn it off.”
On the last morning everyone discusses how long they think they’ll last before turning their phones back on. They wonder if being bombarded with three days of e-mail is really the best way to reenter the world. Kleiman says he feels as if he doesn’t even need his phone anymore, though he admits he won’t get rid of it. McDowell says she still won’t take any of her vacation days, but from now on she vows to go device-free every morning before work. (A month later, she confesses she hasn’t kept this promise.) “I know it’s not PC to say this here, but I miss my phone,” Monfredini says. When she leaves the ranch, the first thing she does is turn it back on.
