Upon closer analysis
A career as a forensic consultant
Thursday September 11 2008
Crime scenes immediately spring to mind when people hear the term ‘forensic’, but ever since the internet first appeared around 20 years ago, forensics is about a lot more than identifying fibres or hair follicles after a murder. Digital evidence has become just as compelling as matching DNA with a suspect.
Most people working in computer forensics are ex-law enforcement officers, according to Christopher Taylor, forensic consultant with Espion. The watershed in his career happened around 1998 when he started to observe fundraising activity for extremist right-wing groups on the web, while working as a detective in New Scotland Yard.
“I came across websites raising funds for the Balkans and Chechnya, which were prominent in the news at the time. We investigated this and traced the money back to financial institutions,” he says.
“The World Trade Centre terrorist attacks created a new focus on the kind of work we were doing [in New Scotland Yard]. Everything we had done until that time was re-examined and when arrests of people from extremist groups took place, computers came in as part of the evidence.”
Taylor started his working life as a “bobby on the beat” and spent 28 years in total working for the Metropolitan Police Service in London. After 9/11, he went to the US for training in ‘Encase’ and ‘Forensic Toolkit’, the world’s leading software for forensic examination.
“This software is so powerful it can take a bit-for-bit copy of an entire hard drive and recover deleted files. I examined laptops, floppy disks, emails and so on, searching for snippets of intelligence that could be used as evidence,” Taylor recalls.
“Occasionally, it was used in murder investigations. For example, in the case of a British man in the US who killed his wife and daughter, I was able to establish that he had been researching online how to kill using a knife.”
Taylor retired from the force in June this year and moved to Kilkenny, before taking up the position with information security specialist Espion, which is based in Dublin.
“I’m doing the same thing as I did in Scotland Yard, but without the powers of knocking the door down! I look at virtual break-ins, using forensic tools to recover traces of hackers when there has been inappropriate use of internal systems or loss of data,” he says.
Web link:
www.forensics.ie
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- Sorcha Corcoran
