News and information about Data Privacy, Computer Forensics, or anything techie-related.

Hi everybody. I just wanted to announce that my team “Barely Legal” recently finished First Place in the Civilian category (5th overall) at the 2009 DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge. This competition, conducted by the US Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, had over 1150 entries from 49 states and 30 countries, and is one of the major tests of the digital forensics community for investigative skills, tools, techniques and methodologies. This is our second Top 10 finish in the past two years (last year we finished 2nd Civilian, 6th overall) so we are very proud of our continued improvement in this global competition.

This year’s challenge presented a fictional scenario re-creating what an actual examiner might face in a Digital Forensics Lab. It included sections on Image Analysis, Suspicious Software, File Signatures, Hashing Metadata, Steganography (Data Hiding), File Encryption, File Headers, Password Recovery, Registry Analysis, Log File Recovery, and more. For information on the actual competition, go to http://www.dc3.mil/2009_challenge

I’d like to thank my teammates Mark Liphardt and Kevin Cohen for their support and teamwork throughout the competition, and we look forward to “winning it all” next year! And feel free to call and/or email if you have any questions about the competition (or would like to peek at our answer sheet).