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Ride the Lightning: Electronic Evidence

An electronic evidence and computer forensics blog by noted author, lecturer and consultant Sharon Nelson.

Post Frequency: 1.7/day

Last Entry: November 04, 2020 at 10:00:00

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: PALIN'S HACKER CHARGED

Posted on October 08, 2008
It has just been reported that David Kernell (20), of Knoxville, TN has been charged with accessing Governor?s Palin?s Yahoo! e-mail account without authority. See my previous blog post for details of the hack. Kernell is an economics student at...

MD5 COLLISIONS ? ARE THEY REAL? A PRACTICAL THREAT?

Posted on October 06, 2008
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the validity and use of MD5 hashes, especially as it relates to electronic discovery. In a previous post, I mentioned that identical files will have the same hash value. What about...

HE?S BAAACK! MITNICK DETAINED BY FEDS

Posted on October 03, 2008
On September 16th, former famed hacker and social engineer Kevin Mitnick was detained by customs agents in Atlanta after returning from a trip to Columbia. Since his release from prison eight years ago, Kevin has been squeaky clean, but for...

NOT WITH MY LAPTOP, YOU DON?T: SENATOR FEINGOLD LEADS THE CHARGE

Posted on October 01, 2008
Most Americans would be appalled to know that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent can explore your laptop at will and without probable cause, having it confiscated if it pleases the agent so the laptop can be explored by...

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FACEBOOK HITS HOME IN GRUNDY, VIRGINIA

Posted on September 30, 2008
So here, as promised, is my report from Grundy, Virginia and the Appalachian School of Law. Our student tour guide described Grundy as 9 miles long and � mile wide. Looks to be about right. Last night when we arrived,...

DO IDENTICAL FILES EVER HAVE DIFFERENT HASH VALUES? AH . . . NO

Posted on September 29, 2008
Before I get to the title question above, I have to tell you that we are in W.V., where (could I make this up?) the front page of The Dominion Post has a headline reading ?Charge dropped against man accused...

UPDATE TO THE HACK OF PALIN?S E-MAIL

Posted on September 25, 2008
A federal grand heard evidence against David Kernell, the son of Democratic Tennessee State Rep. Mike Kernell, in the hacking of Governor Sarah Palin's e-mail. It failed to return an indictment, but there is an ongoing FBI investigation and subsequent...

RULE 502 BECOMES LAW

Posted on September 24, 2008
On Friday, September 19, 2008, the President signed into law S. 2450, adding new Evidence Rule 502 to the Federal Rules of Evidence. For further information about the implications to the electronic evidence world of this rule regarding the inadvertent...

FOUNDATIONS OF DIGITAL EVIDENCE BY GEORGE L. PAUL

Posted on September 22, 2008
I want to thank my friend and colleague George Paul for waking dormant brain cells that I thought Captain Jack had killed off long ago. George is a true scholar, and reading his new book, Foundations of Digital Evidence (ABA...

YOU TUBE TASER VIDEO: THE 11TH CIRCUIT SHOULD BE ASHAMED

Posted on September 19, 2008
My brother is a cop. I am part of the extended family of cops who worry constantly about what might happen to the person in uniform that they love. But there?s no free pass for being a cop ? no...

GOVERNOR PALIN?S E-MAIL HACKED: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT FOR BOTH SIDES?

Posted on September 18, 2008
Hardly new, hacking into someone?s e-mail. But when it is a Vice Presidential candidate, it attracts attention. First and foremost, this action was clearly illegal and cannot be condoned. A group called ?Anonymous? claimed responsibility for the hack, and the...

WEBCAM STRIPTEASES: THE GIFT THAT BACKFIRES

Posted on September 17, 2008
There seems to be a growing and incomprehensible (to me) phenomenon of ladies young and old filming themselves doing a striptease (or worse) as a gift to their boyfriends/husbands. So why does someone doing computer forensics know this? Because men...

YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO ACCEPT IT . . .

Posted on September 16, 2008
Apologies for the brief hiatus. I have just returned to work after tending to the storybook wedding of one of my daughters. Though I feel as though I?ve been hit by a freight train, I?m back. From the mailbag: A...

FINALLY ? RULE 502 PASSED BY HOUSE

Posted on September 12, 2008
Things don?t exactly move fast in Congress. It was a relief to those in the electronic evidence world that the House of Representative passed Rule 502 (S. 2450) on September 8th. As the House version is identical to the version...

FROM THE MAILBAG: HOW TO REPEAL STATE PI REQUIREMENTS

Posted on September 10, 2008
I love the thoughtful e-mails from readers of ?Ride the Lightning.? There were several received last week that I want to respond to. E-mails came in from both Michigan and Texas. Texas appears to be working to repeal the PI...

EVER BEEN TO SANTO DOMINGO? OUR CELL PHONE HAS

Posted on September 08, 2008
Apparently, cell phone cloning (not the animal kind) is a reality. We know, because we?ve had first hand experience. If you can believe it, we have a cell phone without a camera. Because we have several computer forensics testifying experts...

COME FLY WITH ME. YIKES, WHERE?S MY LAPTOP?

Posted on September 05, 2008
Lawyers routinely fly with their laptops, replete with electronic evidence and confidential client data. A new study from the venerable Ponemon Institutes reports that business travelers are now losing about 12,000 laptops a year at U.S. airports, some of them...

DANCING IN THE MINEFIELD: LEGAL OUTSOURCING ABROAD

Posted on September 04, 2008
On August 5th, the American Bar Association released Formal Opinion 08-451, regarding a lawyer?s obligation when outsourcing legal and nonlegal support services. There was, initially, quite a ballyhoo over the fact that the ABA had endorsed outsourcing in its opinion...

LAWYER SNOOP RECEIVES TWO YEAR SUSPENSION

Posted on June 13, 2008
On May 23d, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals May 23 suspended Michael P. Markins from the practice of law for two years after he broke into his wife?s law firm computer system while looking for evidence that his...

WHALES SWALLOWING WHALES: FTI ACQUIRES ATTENEX

Posted on June 12, 2008
On June 10th, FTI Consulting Inc. announced that it had signed a merger agreement to acquire Attenex. Purchase price? Approximately $88 million in cash. This is now an electronic discovery and ESI processing behemoth and quite a force to be...

ANTI-CHILD PORN TACTIC DOOMED TO FAILURE?

Posted on June 11, 2008
It?s no secret that those who seek out child pornography are usually ensnared by a web of electronic evidence. On June 10th, three ISPs announced that they would block access to online child pornography. While their goal is laudable, a...

DRIVECRYPT: FOILING LAPTOP BORDER SEARCHES

Posted on June 09, 2008
Ah, those pesky Customs agents who insist on searching laptops with nary a probable cause in sight. Most of the time, the offending material discovered is child pornography. As always in the world of electronic evidence, law enforcement is limping...

TOSSING PRIVILEGE OVERBOARD: VICTOR STANLEY V. CREATIVE PIPE

Posted on June 06, 2008
It?s the case everyone is talking about. Defendants inadvertently produced 165 documents which they claimed were privileged. The formidable Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm has written a thoughtful opinion which truly bears careful study. In the end, sloppy electronic discovery...

HANY?S MY HERO: DETECTING ALTERED DIGITAL IMAGES

Posted on June 04, 2008
They just don?t come MUCH smarter than Hany Farid. This Dartmouth professor, who is widely regarded as the best of the best at detecting altered digital images (and wrote software to assist this process), wrote an article for this month?s...

CLUELESS OR CLUED-UP? EDD READINESS SURVEY FROM XEROX

Posted on June 02, 2008
From our foxhole, the number of in-house counsel who are, as our British friends would say, ?clued-up? about electronic discovery remains small. It was interesting to see that a survey commissioned by Xerox Litigation Services and reported today in Business...

MAC NABS CROOKS WITH BACK TO MY MAC AND PHOTOBOOTH

Posted on May 29, 2008
A new twist on electronic evidence: Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that a stolen Macintosh computer helped solve a burglary of a New York City apartment. The thieves stole many items, including TVs, iPods and DVDs, along...

SENDING EDD DOCUMENTS ABROAD FOR REVIEW? HAVE YOU WAIVED FOURTH AMENDMENT PROTECTION?

Posted on May 27, 2008
K&L Gates had a really fascinating post today about a new federal lawsuit in which the law firm of Newman McIntosh & Hennessey, LLP of Bethesda, Maryland, is seeking declaratory and injunctive relief in order to gain certainty about whether...

HOW TO LOOK LIKE A MORON: METADATA MAKES IT EASY

Posted on May 21, 2008
Rick Segal, a venture capitalist and author of The Post Money Value blog, recently posted a hilarious metadata misadventure. Upon receiving a 115 page business plan, he checked the metadata and found that the plan?s author had failed to strip...

JUDGES GO TO ED SCHOOL

Posted on May 19, 2008
Last week, John and I taught classes for the Judicial Conference of Virginia. So what are the judges thinking about with respect to electronic discovery? It is always interesting to hear from judges ? their perspective is much different than...

?MY BAD? ? ACCESSDATA GIVES ME A CALL

Posted on May 16, 2008
The blogosphere is an amazing place. Very shortly after I published my negative review of FTK 2, I received a phone call from Brian Karney, the COO of AccessData. To give credit where credit is certainly due, Brian offered a...

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