ARMY AL&T
owner. Te authorization generally spec- ifies what can be looked for, as a warrant for a physical search does: It’s usually not blanket permission to rifle through a house (or read all the texts on an iPhone) at random, but permission to look for things that might be relevant to a case.
IT’S META, MAN Detectives in the non-digital realm look for strands of hair, tire tracks or weap- ons. Digital forensics investigators look for digital data—files, images, video— and metadata. Metadata is information about data, such as when it was created, if it was modified and by whom. Te length of a phone call, for instance, is metadata that can be useful even if investigators can’t get or can’t use the contents of the conversation.
Finding links among the many pieces of data is a key contribution of digital foren- sics tools. Analyzing those connections can open up new leads to investigate. If an investigator notices that each of the
three phones sent to a lab connected to the wireless network at McDonald’s on Main Street, that’s a new lead: It could place the suspects together in one location, and the agents working the case could try to inter- view the McDonald’s employees working on that day.
IN THE LAB Army CID now uses upward of 20 forensic tools, each fairly specialized, to investigate and analyze digital devices, according to Eller. Twenty years ago, a case might involve a few hard drives from the suspect’s laptop, and one kind of soft- ware could do all the necessary analysis. Nowadays investigators might need to search a smartphone, an Amazon Alexa, a tablet and the onboard computers from a suspect’s car. Te tools available to access and search computing devices for evidence have likewise grown in number and power.
Digital forensics tools on the market
include EnCase, the granddaddy of digi- tal forensics. It has been in use since 1998,
when it was used primarily to search and analyze hard drives seized during crimi- nal investigations. Now it’s a suite of tools that law enforcement can use to search digital devices linked to a possible crime, and that organizations can use to defend against cyberattacks or to collect informa- tion about the attacks.
Access Data’s Forensic Toolkit can scan a device for “text strings”—groupings of characters—and use those to build a dictionary to decrypt emails or other data that has been encrypted. It can also scan for malware and then analyze what the malicious code could be designed to do, where the infection could have come from, and if the malware is communicating with an outside server or website.
But before forensics examiners can analyze data, they need to be able to see it. Most devices now offer the option of encryption with a passcode, and so there’s another set of digital forensics tools that specialize in breaking that encryption.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Working in laboratories such as this one, digital forensics examiners have access to tools that help them investigate and analyze digital devices. With the proliferation of devices from which to extract valuable information, the software required to perform that analysis has become highly specialized, and the tools available to access and search computing devices for evidence have grown in number and power. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Viktor DFC)
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