As a reminder to anyone posting comments on this blog. All comments are screened for Spam and the amount of links posted in content. And I reserve the right to remove some content if it is linked to a pay site, or a site that has advertising on it. The reason is because of the policies of wordpress.com. I think there policy is a bit unreasonable however I really don’t want this blog suspended because there are links to blogs or sites that have advertising on it. And unfortunately if you post more than one url link per post it will be automatically be put into the Spam bin that is deleted in a few days if I don’t check it, which does happen. (I really do try to look!) So if you have any really awesome site please post one url per comment I will look at the site to see if it qualifies under the wordpress terms of service.
Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) Easily capture important “live” computer evidence at the scene in cybercrime investigations, without special forensics expertise.
Law enforcement agencies around the world face a common challenge in their fight against cybercrime, child pornography, online fraud, and other computer-facilitated crimes: They must capture important evidence on a computer at the scene of an investigation before it is powered down and removed for later analysis. “Live” evidence, such as active system processes and network data, is volatile and may be lost in the process of turning off a computer. How does an officer on the scene effectively do this if he or she is not a trained computer forensics expert?
To help solve this problem, Microsoft has created Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), designed exclusively for use by law enforcement agencies. COFEE brings together a number of common digital forensics capabilities into a fast, easy-to-use, automated tool for first responders. And COFEE is being provided—at no charge—to law enforcement around the world.
MICROSOFT’S DIGITAL FORENSICS software has been spotted on a file-sharing site, available for all to download.
Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE) is a forensics tool that fits on a USB drive for the police to use in PC forensics.
The software is free to police forces around the world and helps access details about crimes such as identity theft, online fraud, child pornography and illegal filesharing before criminals can wipe the information.
It’s reportedly illegal for unauthorised people to download and use the software.
According to the Vole it takes the average bobbie “with even minimal computer experience” less than ten minutes to master the program.
“This enables the officer to take advantage of the same common digital forensics tools used by experts to gather important volatile evidence, while doing little more than simply inserting a USB device into the computer,” said Microsoft.
The Vole and police are worried that cyber criminals could analyse COFEE and write code that would identify and intercept it, securely wiping incriminating data from their hard drives.
COFEE requires Windows XP but it does have some Windows Vista support. According to company insiders, Microsoft is developing a new version of COFEE that will be released next year for Windows Vista and Windows 7. µ
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement of a new U.S. policy on global Internet Freedom included a bold new statement about the responsibilities of American technology companies:
…We are urging U.S. media companies to take a proactive role in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship and surveillance. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression. And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply what’s a quick profit.
We couldn’t agree more.
While Clinton focuses on media companies — meaning Internet media companies like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft — there are plenty of other companies deserving scrutiny. Specfically, many U.S. (and multinational) technology companies may be knowingly selling Chinese authorities the surveillance equipment used to commit or facilitate human rights abuses. We think it’s high time to pay attention to them as well.
