Recently the Seattle Times ran an article titled ‘Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime’ http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2004379751_msftlaw29.html  The article while written well contains a few errors.  While I have not personally seen the new software product here are some insights that I have on it.  It is a pure software product that is used to create batch.  There is a lot of buzz about this software containing a ‘backdoor’ to access encrypted data.  This software does not contain any backdoor possibilities.  Yes it can read encrypted data if you supply your batch file with the key to access that data. Again it is purely a scripting platform that can be used to automate computer forensics data acquisitions.  The best thing that I can liken it to is Visual studio.  You can ‘program’ a ton of things with that framework, but you still need to have an idea of what you’re doing to get started. The Seattle time’s article referred to it as a hardware device because it was on a USB thumb drive.  I can put documents, photos, and programs on a thumb drive, but that doesn’t make them hardware. Referring to this as a hardware device is bad reporting in my opinion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 2:40 am and is filed under Computer forensics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.