Analysing Electronic Forensics Evidence

MORE THAN 20 YEARS ago, I worked with message traffic ad the work told me the importance of verifying source material. Some of the most important message traffic would sound off in my headset. "All Stations Stand by. Sky King. Sky King, message follows. Romeo, Xray, Tango, Alpha, Alpha, One, Charlie, Mike, Two, Tree, Fife, November. I say again, Romeo, Xray, Tango, Alpha, Alpha, One, Charlie, Mike, Two, Tree, Fife, November. Croughton out." The cryptic message would correlate to an action table. If the letters and numbers lined up to an action, we might turn towards Siberia. That never happened but we did get a few spurious messages that weren't from Croughton. We suspected they came from rogues and left it at that because we could confirm important things about the transmitter by knowing time of day or frequency in use. I'm applying these same considerations to rogue emails that occasionally arrive from my bank, from PayPal and from people I know. It's relatively staightfoward to look at the way the alleged sender constructs a return address, salutation or signature element to know that the incoming message is a fake. Now I wish people who get email from me used the same kind of sanity check. If they did, they would recognise little foibles in my electonic correspondence that were carefully included by me. Few spoofers take the time to look truly real.

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Sent mail2blog using Nokia E90 O2-Typepad service after a mini tweet-up with Mark Coughlan in Dublin, Ireland.

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