Digital Triage Forensics

The book I read to research this post was Digital Triage Forensics by Richard Watson et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is about combing a crime scene & applying digital forensics to things like media cards and smartphones. Digital forensics isn't just about policework, increasingly with insurgents planting IED's in places like Iraq the military are finding it saves lives if they can find the perpetrators of crimes against soldiers. In a theatre of war at best you might get 5-60 minutes to examine a scene after a battle has taken place. At worst there may be heavy fighting and they may have to retreat & maybe just collect a couple of unlabelled items. Often if you can get a terrorists smartphone it will contain all that persons criminal activity because often they have to provide proof in order to get paid. In Iraq & Afghanistan there has been an emphasis on providing soldiers at the expense of providing scenes of crimes officers which has resulted in a decrease in convictions for this type of crime. If you look at a site such as http://sourceforge.net you can do a search for cellphone or cell-phone and there is lots of digital forensics software often cheap or free. A cellphone will normally be put in a faraday bag then transferred to an isolation chamber for examination. This is a metal box with a glass viewing screen & 2 integrated gloves so you can examine stuff. There is also an integrated closing lid with a lock. It's a good idea to use a stylus for jobs like examining the sim card. EnCase is probably the primary pc program for examining media cards. There is also a program called DDS which helps examine a mobile phone and is easy to use.