April 1, 2025 Mind Your Own DF/IR Business " It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. " -Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations I read a lot of your posts. Yes, yours. Virtually all of you in DF/IR, in the practice both in and outside of law enforcement. A bunch of you in professional litigation support and incident response services. Those of you who run, operate and work with digital forensic teams across the US and across the World. I read the posts about the psychological toll that DF/IR work can take on a person. I read the posts about the new artifacts that are discovered in iOS. I read the deep-dives into location data and SEGB files. I read the success stories about those who conduct child exploitation investigations and their successes in rescuing children and bringing monsters to justice. I read the laments over current...
March 1, 2025 Dabblers v. Professionals " If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy, and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged… then everything you do will be suffused with justice." -Marcus Aurelius I recently had a discussion with a colleague or two while attending the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) annual meeting in Baltimore, MD. These discussions revolved around the observation that digital forensics, unlike any other forensic discipline, attracts all kinds of “practitioners” who think they can do the job to an professional, expert-level degree (and tell their clientele they can do the job), but in reality, they are lacking many of the baser elements to practicing a true forensic science discipline. There are several reasons for this, but first, I think it’s important to draw the corollaries between digital forensics and other “hard” forensic sciences. For the purp...