forensics

Video of child-snatching eagle an animation-student fake

Alas for those excited by a video seemingly showing an eagle's unsuccessful attempt to carry off a child: it's not real.

"A shadow analysis revealed some pretty severe inconsistencies," said Kevin Connor, president of Fourandsix, an imaging forensics specialist. "It appears to be a fake."

Just as Fourandsix was digging into the matter, a Montreal school said animation students were behind the video. It "was made by Normand Archambault, Loic Mireault, and Felix Marquis-Poulin, students at Centre NAD, in the production simulation workshop class of the Bachelors degree in 3D Animation and Digital Design," a statement from the center said. "Hoaxes produced in this class have already garnered attention, amongst others a video of a penguin having escaped the Montreal Biodome." … Read more

iOS app hacking alive and well

LAS VEGAS -- While Apple was making its decidedly lackluster Black Hat debut just one floor up, security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski was explaining the dark art of iOS app hacking to a smaller but still crowded room.

A senior forensics scientist at viaForensics, he clearly didn't have much faith in the security of apps running on iOS. "iOS can be infected through a new zero-day, or you can take a phone and run real fast. Apparently, bars are a great way to pick up iPhones," he said as the audience chuckled, clearly remembering the two separate lost iPhone prototype incidents. … Read more

MIT GelSight is portable, high-res 3D imaging tech

MIT researchers have improved a gel technology that can image microscopic features without expensive equipment, opening up applications in forensics, medicine, and other fields.

Developed by Edward Adelson, Micah Johnson, and colleagues, GelSight acquires surface textures and shapes by pressing a block of clear rubber onto them, revealing striking 3D details. It can even visualize a pulse when pressed on a wrist.

Originally presented in 2009, the technology has been improved to resolve features as small as 2 microns across and is being presented in a paper (PDF) at this week's Siggraph 2011 computer graphics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. … Read more

Study: iPhone, Android apps store sensitive user info

Mobile apps are still not secure when it comes to storing certain personal information, according to a new study from security firm ViaForensics.

Dissecting a variety of apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, ViaForensics found that 76 percent of them store user names in cleartext without encryption, while 10 percent store passwords in the same way, making such data more vulnerable. Running a series of tests from November 2010 through June 2011, the security firm checked out apps from several categories, including financial, social networking, productivity, and retail.

Each individual app received a pass, fail, or warn … Read more

How bin Laden evaded the NSA: Sneakernet

Far from being a technological recluse, Osama bin Laden was a prolific e-mail writer who reportedly relied on flash drives, couriers, and sneakernet to keep in touch with his correspondents.

Although bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan lacked phone and Internet connectivity, the al Qaeda leader used his computers to prepare messages and save them on flash drives, which would be passed to a courier, according to the Associated Press. The courier would head to a far-flung Internet cafe, send the outgoing messages, retrieve the incoming ones, and then return to Abbottabad with the responses.

That physical couriering of data, … Read more

How police have obtained iPhone, iPad tracking logs

Law enforcement agencies have known since at least last year that an iPhone or iPad surreptitiously records its owner's approximate location, and have used that geolocation data to aid criminal investigations.

Apple has never publicized the undocumented feature buried deep within the software that operates iPhones and iPads, which became the topic of criticism this week after a researcher at a conference in Santa Clara, Calif., described in detail how it works. Apple had acknowledged to Congress last year only that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to … Read more

Software links police sketches to mug shots

Here's a new spin on an old way to catch crooks--researchers at Michigan State University have developed algorithms and software that can match police sketches to thousands of mug shots in a database.

The research, by MSU computer science and engineering professor Anil Jain and doctoral student Brendan Klare, is being published in this month's edition of the journal IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

Mug shots and composite sketches have long been used in police investigation, but witness descriptions can be inaccurate. The researchers say their project is the first large-scale experiment to link the … Read more

Police researchers lift fingerprints from fabric

Scottish researchers say they're having success getting fingerprints from fabric, a feat that traditionally has been difficult for forensic sleuths.

The researcher at the Scottish Police Services Authority (SPSA) and the University of Abertay, Dundee, are experimenting with gold and zinc in a technique called vacuum metal deposition, which is used to find prints on smooth surfaces such as glass and plastic.

Fabrics are placed in a vacuum chamber and coated with evaporated gold as well as zinc, which binds to the gold where there are no fingerprint marks. The resulting impressions indicate where a finger or hand has … Read more

FBI issues warrants over pro-WikiLeaks attacks

The FBI is on the hunt for the hackers responsible for a recent wave of cyberattacks launched in defense of WikiLeaks.

FBI agents yesterday executed more than 40 search warrants in the United States as part of their ongoing investigation. Pointing to the group Anonymous, which has taken responsibility for the attacks, the FBI said that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults were facilitated by software the group makes available as free downloads.

Late last year, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and other companies were hit by DDoS attacks triggered by activists in support of WikiLeaks after the companies cut off … Read more

iPhone forensics seminar to expose security holes?

For years, published examples of security breaches at banks, credit card companies, and on home PCs have put us all on guard for identity theft. Would you be surprised to find out that, despite all this bad news, the iPhone and the iPod Touch are not as secure as they should be? It's true: neither of these devices does what it should to protect your personal information, and the upcoming O'Reilly Forensics Workshop--a meeting that highlights various ways to get data out of either of these popular Apple devices--proves it.

Taking place in Chicago on May 26, … Read more