As The Wall Street Journal reported on December 3, a Minnesota jury has found the operator of a $US3.65 billion Ponzi scheme guilty of all 20 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, potentially consigning him to life in prison without parole. The racket dates back at least a decade. At the time [...]

The Indian outsourcing firm, Satyam Computer Services, which was the subject of the country’s biggest corporate fraud scandal in January 2009, has been hit with a tranche of supplementary charges. According to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, the extent of the total fraud now stands at around $US3 billion. What the Bureau has revealed provides [...] […]

A new trans-Atlantic survey has confirmed what many suspected: staff moving on to another job will often take much more than their payout with them. While you can’t stop employees carrying your company’s intellectual property out in their heads, there is something you can do to protect yourself before they leave. Call in a team [...]

With new technologies being introduced into your business environment at a dazzling pace, it’s easy to overlook the extent to which the divide between your employees’ work time and their private lives and ambitions is increasingly blurred. Some corporate managers wonder whether they can any longer define where it is. One American CEO recently observed [...] […]

The risk of hackers penetrating your company’s database and exposing your commercial secrets – if not some dirty linen as well – was brought home recently when the internal musings of Britain’s leading climate science research centre were laid bare. Thousands of private emails between top climate change scientists were made public, revealing the bitter [...] […]

Mid-November brought an embarrassing admission from a mobile phone company in the UK. T-Mobile had to inform Commissioner Christopher Graham, Britain’s watchdog responsible for safeguarding personal information that staff had passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers. Graham, whose office is currently preparing a case f […]

Australia’s Daily Telegraph ran a useful report in mid-November on payroll fraud, a form of financial crime that is often particularly difficult to detect. One victim, a whitegoods and electrical retailer, managed to retrieve the $A20 million stolen by its payroll officer, but most companies never see their money again. And the crooks involved don’t [...] […]

Only a few months ago, mention of the name Bernard Madoff brought to mind America’s biggest-ever Ponzi scheme. The sheer scale of the financial fraud involved and the audacity with which it was carried out dazzled most people. Fast forward to now and Madoff as an individual has largely faded from sight. Instead, it’s the [...]

Economic and commercial espionage has a much lower profile than it deserves – dangerously low. It’s an area where many companies remain unaware of their vulnerability, believing that unless they’ve invented something like a cure for the common cold, no one is likely to be interested in what they’re doing. That’s definitely not the case, [...]

The new digital world of easy communications and social networking is so surprisingly open that many no longer see the problem as one of Big Brother watching us. It’s more a matter of us being obsessed with watching each other. And sharing, too. As The New York Times put it in September, “Your parents probably [...]

by Dennis Kiker, Director of Professional Services, Fios, Inc. I am fortunate in that I work out of my home, which has decided advantages at times, particularly at this time of year when I can look out my window on the neighborhood and enjoy the autumn colors.  In Virginia, as in much of the Southeastern United States, we have a tree we call the “gumball” tr […]

By Aaron Pippin, Senior Project Manager, Fios, Inc. In our industry, individuals often want to provide value by delivering more than what was actually asked for.  In the Project Management world, this is known as “Gold Plating.”  Providing value is always a good thing; however, gold plating can lead to undesirable issues. For example, if a client asks […]

by Dennis Kiker, Esq., Director, Professional Services, Fios, Inc. Cost containment continued to be the most recurrent theme on day two of the Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute.  And by a pretty wide margin (with no disrespect to any of the other excellent speakers), Ralph Losey and Jason Baron’s presentation on advanced search had to be the most ent […]

by Dennis Kiker, Esq., Director, Professional Services, Fios, Inc. I’ve often heard colleagues ask prospective clients, “What keeps you up at night?”  Or, “What worries you about e-discovery?”  After all, that is what we, as vendors, want to know: how can our products or services ease your concerns, so that you’ll purchase our products or services.  Thus, it […]

by Dennis Kiker, Esq., Director, Professional Services, Fios Inc. Last night was cold, rainy, and rather gloomy here in Washington, D.C.  It was also Veteran’s Day, so sensible people had chosen to join their government colleagues and stay home or retire early for the day.  So what else would someone facing a two-day e-discovery marathon choose to do on such […]

In the previous post in this series on NTFS file systems, we were just dipping our feet in the complicated waters by examining the output of fsstat. Let’s pick up where we left off. Below is the $AttrDef Attribute Values section of fsstat’s output from the previous post: $AttrDef Attribute Values: $STANDARD_INFORMATION (16) Size: 48-72 [...]

Computer Forensic Training is becoming more critical to your organizations incident response plan due to some of the current threats that are being discovered.  Organizations will find more and more that they will need a team of trained incident responders and computer forensic analysts.  Your organization needs to be prepared on how to handle sophisticated […]

Earlier this year, a life time ago in internet years, I published a series of posts on the FAT file system. Over the next few months, I’ll be publishing a similar series on NTFS. Much of the information contained in these posts will come from Brian Carrier’s excellent book, File System Forensic Analysis, articles from [...]

DNA - 6 years retention

Harriet Harman is not having a good time. She is accused of failing to stop at road traffic accident, she was embroiled in the  expenses claims fiasco, and she is the deputy leader of a party that just got dropped by the biggest selling paper in the UK. But, this is not why she is [...]

If the rummors are true, this would be big news in the ED world, Full Article If Microsoft, as rumored, were to buy Autonomy, there would be a seismic ripple felt through eDiscovery-related markets.  First, Microsoft would own two of the leading search products in the market (Autonomy and FAST).  Second, Microsoft would have applications to provide [...]

The two great friends talked every day and shared information about all of their exploits — sexual, narcotic and hacking — according to prosecutors. Now another thing they’ll have to share information about is their experience in federal prison. While accused TJX hacker kingpin Albert Gonzalez awaits a possible sentence of 17 years or more […]

It took seven months but President Obama has finally found someone to take the cybersecurity czar job no one wanted. Howard Schmidt,  a former Microsoft security executive and a one-time cybersecurity adviser to President George W. Bush, has been appointed to the position of cybersecurity coordinator, according to a White House announcement Tuesday. Schmidt […]

Flashback, early 2008: Citibank officials are witnessing a huge spike in fraudulent withdrawals from New York area ATMs — $180,000 is stolen from cash machines on the Upper East Side in just three days.  After a stakeout, police arrest one man walking out of a bank with thousands of dollars in cash and 12 reprogrammed [...]