Digital Undercurrents

Researchers from Australia have published a new paper indicating that forensic tasks will be a lot more difficult on solid-state drives than it is on standard hard drives. Routines built into the drive hardware to clean up unused space will alter data, without any human intervention at all. Worse yet, tools like “write blockers” are ineffective because the actions are internal to the drive and not initiated from the outside.

Evidence gathering is going to be a lot tougher until some new tools are developed.

The unique services of callservice.biz, which assisted thousands of identity thieves since the site’s founding in 2007, have been shut down.

The idea was simple: since many identity thieves are operating in non-English-speaking countries, they need people with believably American accents to talk to bankers. Callservice.biz supplied voice talent, in German or English, to use the data stolen by criminals to impersonate account holders and authorize things like wire transfers or withdrawals.

The owner of the site, Dmitry M. Naskovets, has pled guilty to wire fraud charges and is facing up to thirty seven and a half years in prison.

It’s a given in the world of research universities that the school is at least a partial owner of new patents or products created by its faculty. But with students creating more and more “apps” for platforms like iOS and Android, and with those apps often being worth big money, policies on university ownership of student creations are getting more attention.

From the article:

Missouri relented in Brown’s case. It also wrote rules explicitly giving student inventors the legal right to their unique ideas developed under specific circumstances. If the invention came from a school contest, extracurricular club or individual initiative, the university keeps its hands off. If the student invention came about under a professor’s supervision, using school resources or grant money, then the university can assert an ownership right – just as it does for faculty researchers.

This is an important trend that needs to be watched – in your organization, are there policies governing what intellectual property rights belong to the company for work performed by employees? If one of your call center workers invents The Next Big Thing while taking a support call, what happens?

If you haven’t thought about this yet, it’s probably time. Writing policies as they are needed is never a good idea.

An appellate court in California has ruled that attorney-client privilege does not apply to messages sent from a client using his or her corporate email account; the particular case was that of a young woman who felt that her employers had become hostile when learning of her pregnancy. The emails between her and her attorney were introduced at trial as evidence of her emotional state.

The emails were not considered confidential because the small business involved had a written policy declaring email to be monitored and intended for business use only. This is further proof of how important it is to have properly written and publicized security policies in a business environment.