Company News

Sharon Nelson Featured in ACM News

March 14, 2019

At the end of January, Sensei’s Sharon Nelson was featured in “Crawling Inside Hard Drives” by John Delaney with Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM brings together computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges.

Excerpt: Digital forensics is a new field, relatively speaking, but growth metrics are hard to find. John P. Lucich, president of the High Tech Crime Network, a Union, NJ-based organization offering certifications in computer forensics, explains the field has grown dramatically since the late 1980s. “Forensic software did not come around until the mid-1990s,” Lucich says. Before that, Luccini recalls, he would use SnapBack, a Columbia Data Products program to image drives, and then he would restore and install those images on clean drives. After that, he would use Norton Techsearch to forensically examine the drives.

Sharon D. Nelson, president of Sensei Enterprises, a digital forensics and cybersecurity firm based in Fairfax, VA, and author of several books on digital evidence, says that since she became involved with digital forensics in the late 1990s, a lot has changed. In the beginning, computers and servers were being imaged; today, Sensei Enterprises examines more smartphones than any other type of digital device.

Mobile devices are where most digital evidence is found today, according to Craig Ball, a trial lawyer, computer forensic examiner, adjunct professor of law in the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and noted authority on electronic evidence. Ball says mobile devices have eclipsed laptop and desktop computers as the principal conduit to online information, with texts and app data residing almost exclusively on mobile devices.

Read the entire article here.