|
|
|
Back
|
|
MVPCUG Meeting Minutes MVPCUG General Meeting Minutes, Meeting of Tuesday, February 4, 2003 The MVPCUG general meeting was held in the Whitesboro High School cafeteria. President Joe Madeira called the meeting to order at 6:05 p.m. Business Meeting The minutes as posted on the web of the January general meeting were approved by members present. Joe reported that elections will be held in March and encouraged nominations from the club members. Louis Barile will be doing an audit of the 2002 financial records of the club. Joe reiterated his Newsletter message that there is lots of music available to share for free on the Internet. Tim Clinehens asked for a show of hands of people who had things to sell at next month's auction. About a dozen people responded. Lisa Britt will put an auction form on the club website. Those bringing items to sell must fill in one form for each item. Dave Askew will be the auctioneer. All items will start at $1.00. Sellers may request reserves on any item being auctioned. George Bracken and Don Pianka volunteered to help Tim and Dave with the auction. Bill Gorrell gave the Treasurer's report. January income was $120.65; expenses were $685.44; the balance in the treasury as of 1/31/2002 was $4,328.96. The treasurer's report was accepted to be included with the minutes. Joe mentioned that he activated a software firewall on his computer as a result of Charley Goetz' presentation to the club. Joe suggested that firewalls are a good idea for everyone. Lisa Britt mentioned that free anti-virus software is available from www.grisoft.com. Joe reported that mailers are available at the Post Office for recycling inkjet printer cartridges. Presentation Dan Kalil from Northrop Grumman IT-TASC spoke to us on Digital Forensics. Prior to his current employment at the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, Dan worked for the Connecticut State Police Computer Crime and Electronic Evidence Unit where he received state of the art training. Digital Forensics involves the preservation, recovery and collection of data from digital media including hard disks, floppy disks, CD's, zip disks, DVD's and memory sticks. Digital Forensics is used by a broad spectrum of the community including military, law enforcement, research, business and academia. Sources for media include standalone PCs, PDAs and mobile phones, wired networks and wireless networks. When doing investigations, digital forensic experts look at history logs, chat sessions, admin / user login / logout sessions, success / error logs, firewall logs and router logs as well as individual files. Digital Forensic procedures include crime scene preservation, evidence preservations and labeling, imaging and verification of images, recovery and collection of data, analyses of collected data and presentation of results. Toolkits needed to carry out the forensic procedures include multiple operating systems and platforms, "hacker" utilities, a broad collection of media types and special computers dedicated to forensic analysis that are not on an external network. The types of activities performed include recovery of deleted files, finding files that have been embedded in other files (steganography), breaking encryption, hacking passwords, and exploring slack space in physical files looking for hidden information. Break - At 7:05 we took a 25-minute break. Presentation - Part II A question was asked regarding whom is liable if a third party hacks into someone's computer and deposits child pornography. There is no clear legal answer but it is clear that it is in everyone's best interest to protect his or her computers from hostile access. Some discussions followed on wireless networks. There are lots of unprotected wireless connections including those of major businesses. 128-bit encryption on wireless routers and associated wireless PC cards is recommended for protection. At this point Dan continued with an example of a forensics task that he began prior to the break. He had a floppy disk that did not have a directory on it. He first used special software to make a bit-by-bit copy of the disk and then to identify that there was a logical file on the disk containing a hockey logo. He copied the file out onto his desktop and we were able to see the Rangers logo. He now ran a steganography program on the file to see if there were any embedded files. A password was needed and Dan was able to find one in the slack space of the physical file. The 'stego' program located and extracted an embedded file in the logo file. This embedded file also needed a password that was found in its slack space using DOS software. Thus the hidden message was found. Terrorists use this technique to pass messages. At 8:05 the door prize drawing was held.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:15 p.m. Respectfully submitted, |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Home | Special Interest Groups | Business | Calendar of Events | Newsletter Articles | Reviews | Tidbits © MVPCUG 2002 This page was last updated on: March 2003 |
