[Gllug] Phone scam?

[sean]

On 17/04/2011 20:57, Christopher Hunter wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-04-15 at 13:16 +0100, david at gbenet.com wrote:
>
>
> Incidently, the Plods have little or no computing expertise, and the few
> computer forensic moves they know are entirely defeated by the use of
> Linux, BSD or anything else that's not Windoze!
>
not true now and not even true for several years. i know of one 
ex-'plod' who frequents this list, who had a very good linux knowledge 
when he worked for the police. his knowledge helped him move into linux 
system admin a few years ago.

police officers from several different forces have gone through our 
computer forensics masters course over the years and with most practical 
work linux based, they have to use debian for many months. some of the 
disk images they analyse are constructed to make analysis by the 
standard windows based tools difficult.

i meet police from various high tech crime units and of course some are 
content to only use encase on windows, but some use linux and open 
source tools, usually because it is the best way of doing what they need 
to do. i imagine it all depends if they want an interesting job or not.

i am not a great fan of encase, but it will analyse linux based disk 
images. a file system is just bytes organised into blocks with some data 
structures and algorithms to stitch it all together. the algorithms are 
all documented and open source is of course even easier because the code 
is available.

many police forces are moving away from having police officers doing 
computer forensics work and are hiring civilian technical officers 
instead, mostly with a job spec that includes computer related degree. 
their abilities are a different discussion.

regards

sean

> C.
>
>
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