Recently, I got involved in a research project with a group of smart people from DePaul University. I figured it would be fun to get involved and try something else out--who knows, maybe I'll learn something awesome.
Anyway, this is a forensics project that a group of students at DePaul decided to tackle. They formed a small team, and I joined them. Basically, the objective is to raise awareness of purchasing and selling second-hand equipment, such as laptops, MP3 players, hard drives, printers, etc. Essentially, anything that can store data. While it's true that we are used to purchasing and selling used items on websites like Craigslist, eBay, and Amazon for example, sometimes we don't really think about what it is that we're really buying or selling. For example, when you purchase a new laptop - did you check to make sure it doesn't contain any malware? Or when you sell your old laptop on Craigslist, did you forget to wipe it clean? Or worse, you did wipe it clean, but somehow, there is a way to retrieve your personal data.
All of these are things we're probably not really aware about. As a result, McAfee has purchased and provided more than 50 devices, ranging from external hard drives, laptops, desktops, servers, cell phones, tablets, and many other different devices. Our goal is to establish a methodology to analyze these devices and try to identify any malicious or otherwise potential personal data in the devices. Once our analysis is complete, we will put together a research paper highlighting our findings, as well as have an opportunity to be mentioned once the paper and press release get published.
This should be fun. As I mentioned, I started working on this project recently. Our project's deadline is set for sometime in March. We started organizing the way we will collect and analyze the devices. I'm particularly interested in the mobile side (Android/iOS), as I've never really done much of anything with them. Over all, this should be an interesting learning experience. Hopefully we're able to identify interesting things that we can talk about during the video (oh yeah, there will be a video), as well as in our paper.
Anyway, updates to come!
