Digital Forensics Basics

The book I read to research this post was The Basics of Digital Forensics by John Sammons which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is a good introduction to this field. The FBI has 16 regional training & working digital forensics labs scattered around the United States. Many police stations don't have the funds for a dedicated digital forensics lab or personnel. It's interesting that between 2009 and 2010 the total digital data in the world grew by 62%. Dennis Radar also known as the serial killer BTK was caught because he bragged about one of his murders on a floppy disk he sent to a newspaper & a file was found on the disk that led them to a computer that belonged to a church. They found out Radar had access to that computer. They then used DNA taken from his daughter which was a close match to DNA taken from the floppy disk and which showed it belonged to her father. He is currently serving 10 life sentences for the murders. Another case was the case of Casey Anthony who was accused of murdering her daughter they showed that she had searched on her computer for words like chloroform among others. Another case was someone was using stolen credit card numbers to buy merchandise & they followed one of the packages to a house that belonged to a couple who were arrested. They then found that the stolen credit card numbers had been used by other people. This led to 22 arrests and the recovery of $100,000 worth of merchandise. It was obvious that it was a case of organised crime & all those convicted went to prison.