Digital Forensics Tips

In April of this year, I saw a thread on Forensicfocus.com discussing a new smart phone app called “Burner” which lets users purchase disposable phone numbers for short-term use. The application has some very practical uses for online activity – such as selling items on Craigslist – but it also has some obvious implications for anybody performing digital forensics work. At this moment, none of the commercial mobile device forensics tools I have available to me parsed the data from the burner application. I’m sure that will change if the app continues to grow in popularity. I recently had an opportunity to install Burner on my iPhone 5 and examine the artifacts left on the phone after I used it. I also wrote a Python script to parse information from the burner.sqlite file and generate a HTML report. I’ve affectionately named the script ‘Oven Mitt’. Burner leaves quite a bit of data intact on the device. Additionally, a lot of what it does cover up can be acquired by other mea...

I recently encountered a Rand McNally Intelliroute TND 720 GPS unit and none of the commercial forensic tools had the ability to acquire data from the device so I imaged the device and poked around for any interesting data files. I found a file called DestHistory.txt which obviously peaked my interested. I opened the file in notepad and while it contained a lot of unusual characters it also contained multiple recent destinations sandwiched in between those characters. I wrote a small python script which takes the contents of the DestHistory.txt and parses it into both a HTML report and a KML file which can be opened in Google Earth. The tool is called rmparse and can be download here . The project was fairly straight forward. The only hiccup was that the DestHistory.txt is in Unicode format so when my script parsed the file there was a null between every character. I tried a standard B = A.replace( “ “, “”) command but had no luck. I ended up using a B = A.replace(“\x00”, “”) command a...