Thanksgiving break was filled with good food and quality family time. I was thankful to go home and see my family, and very thankful to see my dogs! With break over and over thirty hours of driving behind me, it’s time to really start on final projects and finish up my internship at the LCDI. It was nice having a break, but the next few weeks are going to be stressful ones.
Using Autopsy
At this point in the internship, our project is almost done and all we need to finish is wrapping up the final report. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m on the Tool Evaluation team, specifically using the tool Autopsy. At the beginning of the project, all partnerships on the team picked a tool, and began researching it. Once everyone knew the ins and outs of their tool, we started generating data to test.
Using a murder scenario, we put ourselves in the mind of a killer: browsing the computer, doing searches, sending emails, and researching and shopping for poison. All of this was done within a virtual machine, which is basically an environment to run a “computer” within your own computer. A forensic image, or bit-for-bit copy of this machine, was taken and given to each set of partners. We have been analyzing these images and comparing results— seeing the limits, perks, and downfalls of each one. These results are currently being compiled into a report that we will be finalizing in the next week.
Final Weeks
The semester is going well so far, and the internship is still tying in nicely with all of my classes. My final project for my Intro to Cybercrime class is actually to analyze an image with Autopsy! Knowing a lot about this tool is definitely going to help with this, and I hope I can continue to apply the skills I’ve learned to explore it even more in this project. Right now, I feel behind on all my work (other than my internship), but that’s due to procrastination. This semester has been a hard lesson in time management, and I hope to develop and strengthen these skills in the future. But I am looking forward to pushing everything into high gear and finishing out the semester strong.