Digital Forensics Tips

Recently Ed Michael showed me that Cellebrite now parses cell tower locations from several models of Android phones. He said that this information has been useful a few times but manually finding and mapping the cell tower locations by hand has been a pain in the butt. I figured that it should be easy enough to automate and Anaximander was born. Anaximander consists of two python 2.7 scripts. One you only need to run once to dump the cell tower location information into a SQLite database and the second script you run each time to generate a Google Earth KML file with all of the cell tower locations on it. As an added bonus, the KML file also respects the timestamps in the file so modern versions of Google Earth will have a time slider bar across the top to let you create animated movies or only view results between a specific start and end time. Step one is to acquire the cell tower location. For this we go to http://opencellid.org/ and sign up for a free API. Once we get the API key...

I’ve been using a “jump box” on Digital Ocean for a few years now and recently decided that I wanted to set up a Kali Linux instance on AWS. I ran into a few hiccups getting it up and running, so I documented what worked for me here in the hopes of saving others time and headaches. One of the first articles I came across was by primal security (whose podcast I absolutely LOVE) at http://www.primalsecurity.net/pentesting-in-the-cloud/ . There was some great stuff in this article. Unfortunately it relied on an AWS marketplace Kali Linux image, which is no longer available to new customers. The next article I found was at http://sneakerhax.com/kali-linux-in-the-ec2-cloud/ . It was very close to what I needed, with a few exceptions, including: the default install for the Debian Jessie instance at the link they provided had a default main partition drive size of only 8GB, which was not enough for a full Kali Linux install. I learned that lesson the hard way when my install failed at the v...