E-Investigations Blog
Facebook Makes a PI’s Job so Much Easier
Social Media and Facebook make a PI’s job so much easier. With so many people putting their whole lives online – from photos of themselves and family members to where they had lunch to where they are vacationing, finding out details about someone’s personal life is easier than ever. Instead of putting in hours of surveillance to take photographs of associates, all of the photos are already in Facebook, and nicely tagged. (Especially easy if the subject hasn’t set their privacy settings allowing anyone to view their page). And if we do need to know where the subject is going to be that night, we can use Foursquare to find out where they checked in, and send our investigators to that location.
Employers are catching on to the value of gaining information from Facebook, by requesting user names and passwords. This has sparked a lot of controversy on legality and privacy rights. Regardless, social media is a wealth of information…good and bad. Maybe people shouldn’t share so much online….just a thought.
Hold That Password: The New Reality of Evaluating Job Applicants
The FBI Could Shut Down Your Internet in July
International hackers have infected hundreds of thousands of computers with malicious software. The FBI set up a safety net to mitigate this hack. However, they plan to shut down this safety system in July which means that users with infected computers would be prevented from accessing the internet. Find out what you can do to fix this problem.
Dan Weiss, Partner, Featured in Houston Magazine
Risky Business
A different sort of wildlife concerns Weiss, one of H-Town’s most notable private eyes. A partner at McCann E-Investigations, which has branches in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and New York, Weiss is on the edge of the global field of electronic investigations.
Because things can go sour in a split-second in his line of work, Weiss carries a concealed weapon. After all, he could run into an angry spouse, an embezzling employee facing jail time or an imbalanced client. “No one ever calls me in a good mood,” he says, noting that many investigations are of a very private, even personal nature, often concerning white-collar clients.
The requirement of discretion helps explain why there is no sign on the door of the local office, tucked away on a quiet Bellaire street just outside the Loop. It’s a quiet space, humming with the subdued efficiency of the world’s most blissed-out dental office. But don’t get the wrong impression: With a suite of forensic devices and specialized software, McCann is keeping malefactors on the run, handling not only missing-person and divorce cases, but also matters of embezzlement, contract fraud and cyber-slander.
There have been some interesting articles in the Wallstreet Journal regarding cyberattacks. Most cyberattacks are random, however, there are a handful that are committed by hackers targeting specific individuals within a company. The attacker knows exactly who they are targeting and what information they are trying to obtain. Many companies work to secure their IT infrastructure, but do not secure information assets. Read the WSJ article.
We’ve seen the increased use of smart phones for communication, especially in companies. With the new smart phones come new apps. With the new apps come the increased risk of malicious software. Read more.
Fire the Company Founder…Get Network Hacked
We recently published a White Paper – The Unchecked Power of the Senior Most IT Professional. This white paper explored the complexities surrounding the termination of a senior level or c-level IT professional (CIO, CTO, Director of IT). We recently ran across an article in Inc. Magazine – A Silicon Valley Tale of Humiliation and Revenge which rang a bell immediately as we had recently published a white paper on the same subject. Read More »
Email Tracing – It’s not that easy
Every email received has an email “header”. The header contains information like the sender email address, recipient email address, program used to send the email, email subject, and at least one timestamp and IP address. There can also be other details such as spam checking information, email priority, thread information, etc. When you attempt to determine where an email originated from, this header information needs to be examined for each “Received” entry to examine the timestamp and IP address.
Sometimes some of this information can be forged, so each IP address entry needs to be cross referenced with the hostname and the timestamp as well as the other entries to determine if there are any forged sections that should be ignored. The IP address chain can be rebuilt by comparing the “received from” IP address and the “received by” IP address. The first IP address in the chain should be the actual IP address of the sender. There can be cases where even the original IP address is not correct either because an IP address anonymizer was used or some other method to hide the original sender information.
Gary Huestis,
McCann E-Investigator
Court Imposes Sanctions for Failure to Conduct Reasonable Inquiry and Late Production
After repeated representations that all responsive documents had been produced, a defendant belatedly discovered and produced an additional 60,000 pages. Upon plaintiffs’ motion for sanctions, the court found that the defendant “did not conduct a reasonable inquiry” to ensure production of all responsive documents and had run “afoul” of Rule 26(e). Accordingly, the court ordered discovery re-opened and that the defendant pay plaintiffs’ reasonable expenses and attorneys’ fees caused by the defendant’s failure, including the cost of the necessary motions and the extended discovery period.Delta/AirTran Baggage Fee Antitrust Litig., 2012 WL 360509 (N.D. Ga. Feb. 3, 2012)View the entire entry:
http://www.ediscoverylaw.com/2012/03/articles/case- summaries/court-imposes- sanctions-for-failure-to- conduct-reasonable-inquiry- and-late-production/index.html Gary Huestis
McCann E-Investigator
The cyber hacker group, Anonymous hacked into 4o child pornography sites and released user information. Read about it here.
Frank Farmilette
McCann E-Investigator
Don’t get rid of that evidence just yet!
There are situations where it can be advantageous to keep your digital evidence, or hardware containing digital evidence instead of destroying it or relinquishing custody. For example; an iPhone 3Gs was turned over to McCann E-Investigations in a case in 2010. The iPhone was locked and encrypted with a passcode. At the time, the most up to date forensic software could forensically read an iPhone, but only if it was not encrypted or if the passcode was known. If the passcode was incorrectly entered 10 times, the phone would erase itself as a sort of self-destruction mode.
