1. The data Ditto collects is too important not to keep safe

Did you know that CRU’s Ditto Forensic Fieldstation is actively developed and is regularly updated via new firmware releases? Each release is free, and you can sign up for an email notification to alert you when a new release comes available.

Digital forensics investigators often ask us to create special field kits. Maybe they need a particular WriteBlocker, cables, and space for hard drives. Or they want to deploy consistent toolkits in the field. We respond by finding the right size Pelican case (or color, as it was with a US agency and our orange field kit), fashioning foam with custom cutouts, and including the right products for efficient digital investigation workflows.

With the holidays rapidly approaching, we wanted to share some gift ideas for the IT tech or professional in your life. Is there a guy in your life who loves computers? Who has spare computer parts in his office, den, or workplace? Then we might have just the gift for you.

Last week, I was at the PhotoPlus show where we always hear horror stories about data
loss (the guy whose internal hard drive died, causing him to try to revive it so he can get
his 10 years of data; someone else who is spending thousands of dollars to get client images
from a failed drive; one photographer telling another about the wedding photos he lost).
There's no shortage of accounts from those who learn the hard way about maintaining backup
discipline.

The list of cloud breakins grows, with recent news of user accounts being breached in the ubiquitous Apple iCloud. As FierceITSecurity puts it, this is not just about naked celebrity photos (or naked anybody photos). iCloud is used by pretty much anyone who owns an Apple iDevice, often without users knowing or thinking about it. To be sure, many of the photos and videos stored up in the Apple infrastructure are of cats and bad food photography, but the fact that our iPhone/etc backups are stored in the iCloud is something to think about.

Today, in a unanimous ruling, the US Supreme Court stated that police
officers need a warrant to search cell phones and other devices in
possession of people they arrest. The ruling states that the vast amount
of data contained on today's phones are protected from routine
inspection; one of the points made by the ruling is that we must today
distinguish between a handwritten note, for example, and the large volumes
of data we routinely generate and store on hard drives and data centers in
the cloud.

A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) study (commissioned by McAfee) estimates the annual cost to business from cybercrime at $445 billion. The direct and indirect costs come from loss of intellectual property, theft of financial assets and sensitive data, opportunity costs, costs to secure networks, and recovery from attacks.

As a leading manufacturer of digital forensic write blocking and imaging tools, we work with many digital forensics educational programs, and want to make sure that educational staff, institutions, labs, and students have access to the latest technology.