Digital Forensics Tips

  Years ago, I wanted to learn digital forensics and started researching what trainings were available. The consensus seemed to be that SANS training courses were amazing, but not inexpensive. I was going to have to pay out of pocket so I also researched if SANS had any programs to help reduce the cost. Thankfully they did, and still do. Many people aren’t aware of what’s available so I wanted to write a post about some of the programs SANS offers.   SANS Work Study Program The first SANS program that I utilized was the SANS Work Study Program, also known as the SANS Facilitator Program. Work Study allows students to attend a SANS training event at a significantly reduced cost. In exchange for facilitating the event, students can save up to 70% on their course fees. Facilitators must be available for the entire duration of the training event and be able to handle various logistical tasks including showing up a day early to help set the conference up and help take it down when it’

Recently I presented a webinar on using ChatGPT for OSINT, where I used the entire one-hour window presenting. I encouraged attendees to ask questions in chat and said I would answer them on my blog. One of the questions was regarding another of OpenAI’s offerings, Whisper. I recently blogged about Whisper, but the summary is that it’s an incredible audio-to-text transcription engine that can be installed on your local system and used 100% free.  The question was, does Whisper send the information to the cloud, or can it be done 100% offline? Offline would be fantastic from an OPSEC and privacy concerns point of view. I found one third-party blog post from when Whisper first launched, which mentioned that it could be used offline, but the official Whisper didn’t explicitly mention it.  In my reply, I said to expect to see a blog post on that soon, and this is that post. I started off by using pip to install Whisper on a small NUC device running Ubuntu 22.04 Once that was done, I inst