Thank You!

What was more surprising than being nominated for a Forensic 4cast award for Best Forensic Blog was actually winning the award when it was presented last week at the SANS Forensic Summit in Austin, Texas. I’ll try to resist nurturing my inner Sally Field with this post, but I’m deeply humbled and appreciative for the award and grateful to all who voted for the blog. I’d also like to thank all of the people who have generously granted me the opportunity to interview them for the blog. The interviews have been a considerable amount of fun for me to do and they are a nice way of injecting other people’s talents and energy into the overall effort.

Go Team

A recent article reported that one in four hackers in the United States are actually informants for the FBI and Secret Service. I tend to be skeptical when it comes to statistics like these, but it sounds plausible enough. While law enforcement has an uphill battle against cybercrime for a variety of reasons, they are getting much better at it and are scoring some nice wins against the bad guys. It doesn’t surprise me at all that agencies like the FBI and Secret Service are not only using their relatively new cyber investigation skills against the bad guys, but are also making effective use of their very well developed traditional skills such undercover operations and the use of confidential informants. It’s also very helpful that United States federal law enforcement has the big hammer of the federal criminal justice system not having any parole.

The Cloud

Not that we needed any more evidence that cloud computing is going to be increasingly ubiquitous at the consumer level, but we certainly received it last week when Apple announced their iCloud service and previewed their new iOS 5 operating system. While it is certainly possible that this particular service could fail to be popular with consumers, it’s another sign that companies like Apple have decided to bet on cloud computing in a big way. One of the biggest new features that we can expect with iOS 5 is removing the need to connect an iPad to a computer to activate it. This will make it easier for people to use an iPad as their sole computing device.