October 27, 2007 4:38 PM PDT
Security Bites Podcast: Why online criminals get away
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CNET's Robert Vamosi interviews Dave Merkel about online digital forensics.
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This week Robert Vamosi interviews Dave Merkel, Mandiant's vice president of products, about how investigators go about finding or (as we'll soon hear) not finding the people responsible for cybercrime. Merkel is a former agent with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
Unlike traditional forensics, which has established protocols in collecting and analyzing physical samples from the real world, digital forensics is a relatively new field, where methods of collecting and handling data are changing rapidly as both technology and the criminals evolve. Digital forensics combines the experience of traditional law enforcement agents with the experience of network administrators. Often the people currently working in digital forensics come from one of these backgrounds.
But it's one thing to collect mountains of data--that's easy. Storage is inexpensive. It's quite another, however, to examine all of it, to weed out the parts that have nothing to do with the investigation, or to find the resources to examine all the data. There are only so many man-hours that can be given to looking for a needle in a haystack.
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