DIGITS LLC’s CEO, Michael McCartney, has been nominated as a finalist in the category of CEO of the Year for infoTech Niagara 2012 Beta Awards!

Co-Founder of DIGITS LLC, Michael McCartney is a highly decorated, 22-year veteran member of the law enforcement community having served as an Assistant Chief Investigator for the New York State Attorney General’s Office (NYSAG) as well as five years with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York. Michael has also served as the head of the Analytical and Forensic Technologies Unit in the Mid West for a national Big 4 Consulting firm based in Chicago. He is an internationally known expert in Computer Crime Investigations and Computer Forensics and is a Certified Forensic Computer Examiner (CFCE) through the International Association of Computer Investigative Specialists.  Read Michael McCartney’s full biography.

For additional information about DIGITS LLC, visit www.digitsllc.com

For a list of the 2012 BETA Awards finalists, please visit infoTech Niagara 2012 BETA Finalists

infoTech Niagara is “the” trade association of Western New York’s information technology industry. Membership in infoTech opens the door to a network of hundreds of companies in western NY and thousands of companies across the nation through the national affiliation. While many community service efforts are shared with members and nonmembers, the support of the membership in continuing our efforts is important. infoTech operates on membership and sponsorship fees.

• Computer Forensics
• Consulting
• Training
• Development
• eDiscovery
• Due Diligence

DIGITS LLC is available when there’s everything to loose.  DIGITS LLC has proven success with providing the forensic evidence  you need during litigation.  DIGITS LLC has provided forensic evidence for many types of cases including: sexual harassment, employee theft, deleted data, corporate espionage, workers compensation, and external data storage.

If you think that DIGITS LLC might be able to help your business, contacts us at info@digitsllc.com.  Visit our website for additional information www.digitsllc.com

Market Research Survey Results
December 2011 to January 2012

1.Top 3 industries that participated:

1)      Information Technology

2)      Non-Profit Fundraising

3)      Marketing

2.Top 3 industry size:

1)      11-50 employees

2)      51-200 employees

3)      10,000+ employees

3. How is time preferred to be spent:

1)      Searching the Internet

2)      Watching T.V.

3)      Listening to the radio

4)      Reading the Newspaper

4. 100% of respondents commute to work VIA car or work from a home office.

5. Top 3 typical workday hours:

1)      8 to 5

2)      8:30 to 5

3)      8:30 to 4:30

6. Top 4 websites visited:

1)      Google

2)      Facebook

3)      Yahoo

4)      LinkedIn

7. Top 6 most read publications:

1)      The Buffalo News

2)      New York Times

3)      Online articles

4)      Wall Street Journal

5)      USA Today

6)      Business First

8. Preferred method of reading publications:

1)      Digital Copy- 57%

2)      Print Copy- 39%

3)      Both- 4%

9. Top 3 preferred methods of accessing the news:

1)      Website

2)      T.V.

3)      Radio

10. Smartphone Owners

1)      Yes- 83%

2)      No- 17%

11. How emails are viewed:

1)      Computer- 30%

2)      Mobile device- 9%

3)      Both- 61%

12. How are work emails accessed:

1)      Email program- 70%

2)      Web-based program- 30%

13. How are personal emails accessed:

1)      Web-based program- 91%

2)      Email program- 9%

14. Involved with Risk Management:

1)      No- 87%

2)      Yes- 13%

15. Information Compromised:

1)      No- 65%

2)      Yes- 35%

Please visit the DIGITS LLC Sweepstakes Policy for additional sweepstakes information. www.digitsllc.com

DIGITS LLC’s Case Study section on the website (http://www.digitsllc.com/showcase/case-studies) delivers real examples how Computer Forensics can help solve everyday troubles.  Featured stories include:

• The Secrets Our Data Tells Us

• Age Discrimination

• Data Recovery

• Sometimes Users do the Stupidest Things…

Computer Forensics is used commonly throughout business (proactively and retroactively) and to help support litigation in the court of law.  DIGITS LLC’s principals and staff have over 115 years of combined law enforcement experience in Computer Forensics and advanced technology investigations.

If you have any questions regarding the services that DIGITS LLC offers, please contact us at info@digitsllc.com.

What do you do when you suspect one of your employees may be violating the biggest trust given them within your organization – embezzling money.   It is a problem that faces every organization, public or private.  With the economic crisis at a feverish pitch, desperate times can lead to desperate measures by even the most ethical and law abiding employees.  Computer Forensics can add a critical tool in fighting fraud.

According to the Report to the Nation 2010 by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Occupational fraud losses are estimated to be at 5% of annual revenues.  When applied to the World Gross Product, that translates to approximately $2.9 Trillion per year.  In addition, the median loss to occupational fraud was $160,000 with about one quarter of those surveyed losing over $1 million.  Most troubling is the fact that most occupational fraud continues for years before detected.  On average, the fraud lasted 18 months from the time it began until it was detected.

So what can you do to better protect yourself and mitigate the losses to fraud, waste and abuse in your organization?  Whether you’re a private or public company, internal audits focus on specific transaction cycles and may not identify issues through their routine procedures and external audits are not designed to specifically detect fraud.  Consider the following scenario which occurs regularly throughout corporate America:

A twenty-year employee who works in the finance department of XYZ Corp is responsible for processing all vendor payments.  Over the last couple of years, the company has seen a slight loss in net income even though sales have steadily increased year over year.  This employee has not taken a vacation in over 3 years and is going through a very bitter divorce.  A routine external audit does not specifically identify any potential wrong doing.

Through a random computer forensic examination of the employee’s computer, critical electronic evidence is discovered that reveals the scheme.  Numerous deleted and windows temporary files are recovered showing thousands of phony invoices being prepared in the name of existing vendors as well as a ghost vendor established by the employee.  These fake invoices were paid by XYZ Corp even though there were no supporting documents to substantiate the invoices.  The investigation determined that these checks were being cashed at a different bank.  The forensic examination shows that the employee is accessing his ghost vendor bank account over the internet from his corporate laptop.  After presenting this forensic evidence to the auditors and with the assistance of outside investigators, the scheme unravels and the employee confesses to the fraud.

This case highlights the power of using computer forensics in conjunction with internal and/or external audit committees to completely examine records for potential fraud.

January 2012

You  can’t pick up a legal publication or check your email without getting bombarded with articles, advertisements, CLE announcements or case law involving new technology in litigation. Everything is “e-discovery this” or “ESI that”… I am hoping to avoid adding to the mass confusion and bombardment in this article by sorting through the major new technologies released in the last few years.

There is too much technology out there to comprehensively write about all of it in a single article.  Instead, we will focus on two types of new technology and dig into each of them enough to explain 1) what all the fuss is about and 2) give you enough knowledge to know what is out there so you’re prepared when the new case comes in and you ask yourself “Is there anything out there that does this…?”

Email Threading

Email threading takes all the emails in your dataset and organizes them into conversations.  The basic premise is, for example: Joe emails Steve, they then reply back and forth to each other twenty times and then, in the middle of that, they forward the messages to a few others who then join in the conversation. This is what is considered an email thread or conversation thread. While the emails may have all been sent over the course of several days (or weeks), conversation threading groups them all together so you can see the entire conversation during your review.  This is a powerful tool for a couple of reasons. First, it groups the conversations together which can allow for a quick “responsive” or “non-responsive” decision on the whole thread.  Secondly, you can see if there are additional custodians to be collected that you might not have thought about before.

Concept Searching

Concept searching has been around for several years but has just recently started to gain some traction.  In litigation, “concept search” refers to the idea that documents are searched on a concept or idea rather than the basic keyword or Boolean search.  For example, if you search for the term “baseball” you may get some hits.  But, if you ran the term “baseball” in a concept search you might get hits on words like home run, single, foul, strike, pitcher outfield, etc.  As much time as the attorneys and paralegals may spend working up what they think is a comprehensive keyword list that they believe will find the relevant documents in a case, it is still unlikely that their searches would find the amount of relevant documents that can be done with a concept search tool in just a fraction of the time.

The  growing amount of data involved in discovery is forcing both council and vendors to quickly adapt with the times. As long as data volume continues to grow, new technology will be developed to better handle the ESI in discovery.

Created in cooperation with the hit CBS franchise, CSI: The Experience invites you to step into the world of cutting-edge forensic science and investigative techniques. Guided by investigators from the television show, along with their real-life forensic science counterparts, you’ll formulate a hypothesis, validate your findings based on forensic evidence, and solve the crime! For a comprehensive overview of the exhibit, visit www.CSITheExperience.org.

In conjunction with CSI: The Experience, the Buffalo Museum of Science will be hosting an additional 21 and over event at the Science Cafe.  This event is called “The Science Behind CSI” and will be held on Friday, March 2, 2012 from 6 to 9 p.m.  DIGITS LLC‘s CEO, Michael McCartney, is a special presenter at this free event, open to the public.  Additional forensic professionals will also be presenting at this event.  Admission into CSI: The Experience will cost $5.00.  Views will be at 6:15p.m., 6:30p.m., 6:45p.m., 7:00p.m., 7:15p.m., 7:30p.m.

“Educate yourself in the real-life.  Science Behind CSI.”

If a person looks at the current landscape of tools used to review email they find a veritable cornucopia of offerings.  So does the world need another?  Yes, it does.

One of the most interesting things I have come to realize since entering the field of digital forensics is that certain things are predictable.  Even before I examine any data, I know that one of the first things I am going to hear is, “How long before I can see the data,” or “I just want to see what’s there,” or some variation on that theme.  It doesn’t matter if the case is coming from an attorney, corporate executive, compliance officer, or even a law enforcement investigator; the request is the same.  They want the data as soon as possible.  What’s often implied is that they want to directly view the data and do not want to wait for it to be interpreted by an examiner.

This is usually a good thing.  As an examiner, who am I to really know the crux of a case?  My job is to evaluate the evidence provided and lend my expert opinion to what may or may not be relevant based on the facts as I know them.  Ultimately though it will be the individual or team closest to the case itself that will determine what really matters and what is just noise.

Enter Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition.

Email is complex.  It is one of the earliest forms of electronic communication and one of the first to be formalized into a specification.  It predates the World Wide Web by almost two decades.  Amazingly, since it was first formalized and scientists agreed on a common format, it has remained largely the same.  At least at its core.  The problem is that specifications are mostly considered a very good idea rather than an immutable law.  As such, email has morphed into a very loose standard that has many features and abilities way beyond what was ever envisioned in the early days.  Each email server has its own nuances and capabilities and each email client treats messages in different ways.  Obtaining apples to apples comparison across disparate technologies is sometimes a difficult process.

At the most basic level, tools designed to examine email are not targeted at an end user.  They are focused on a fully trained forensic examiner who is used to the terminology and technology involved in a low-level dissection of digital evidence.  To think a novice can start them up and be used to just wander through the data is a mistake.  The interface could be mistaken for a space shuttle cockpit simulator with all the buttons and controls and widgets.  Although, to be fair, they tend to be very fully featured products at a seemingly reasonable cost, they have a steep learning curve and lose many times their savings in lost productivity by novices trying to figure them out.

Review tools take a drastic swing upwards after the initial single user, desktop-based applications.  We begin to see products entering the field that have thoughtful interface design, many features, and means to assist a reviewer in making them more productive.  Unfortunately, their price often precludes all but the most affluent firm or corporation as their pricing models often run into the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.  Many times, these bigger applications are also multi-user, meaning that many reviewers can work on one case or distribute the workload.  But, this upside comes with added complexity involved with supporting the software on the network side and providing an adequate server to run it, which could cost thousands of dollars.  These big tools, while very nice, tend to be out of the reach of smaller firms or companies.

With this in mind, we developed Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition to answer these questions:

• How can I see my data as soon as possible?
• Can I do it without an advanced degree to figure out the software?
• Can I do it without breaking the bank?

The answer to all three of these questions is yes.

Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition was not designed for trained forensic examiners.  It was designed by them and even used by them, but it was not aimed specifically at them.  It was aimed at the semi-technical attorney, executive, manager, auditor, or investigator; a person that knows the value of email and can use an email client.

All data in Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition is stored in a forensically sound container that has no writing capability to the original evidence.  If you want to examine an Outlook PST, you could read it from a CD-Rom and have no problems.  Nothing modifies the original evidence so everything is perfectly preserved.  Because of these application-level protections, anyone can feel comfortable working through the data as there is no chance of it being destroyed or compromised in any way.

Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition has been designed, from the outset, to be as simple and intuitive as possible.  From experience, we know what examiners, attorneys, and investigators do with data.  We understand the functions.  We designed the software around that.  We enhanced the features and capabilities we believed would benefit the process and we eliminated or minimized those things that didn’t add value.  Because of this, our interface is almost barren looking in comparison to some other products.  It’s about you getting your work done; not about us cramming as much as possible onto the menu bar.

Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition is also cross platform.  It runs on Windows and Mac.  In our opinion, the Mac version is prettier, but Windows looks nice too.  Regardless of where you fall in the PC vs. Mac debate, the functionality is the same.  As long as you have a new-ish desktop computer running a recent version of Windows or OSX, you can run the software.  Depending on your specific system, it may not be the fastest application due to the raw processing that has to be done on a mail container, but we have run Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition on some very underpowered systems with reasonable results.  On the other side of the performance coin, if you have a good sized server with a lot of RAM and fast disks, Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition can easily take advantage of what is available.  We tested the software in house on computers with over 30GB of RAM and saw amazing results.

Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition has been priced deliberately to allow smaller organizations to purchase without much pain.  At the introductory price of $149.99, this falls below a normal billable hour and can be used again and again on all of your cases.  We can also accommodate bulk licensing as well, just contact us directly to obtain a quote.

We understand that not everyone has multi-million dollar budgets, but everyone wants the same things – get the data as quick as possible and get the work done.  For those reasons and many others we developed a tool to safely read the data, allow a novice user to work effectively without a lot of training or special knowledge, and do it inexpensively.  Evidence Analyzer: Email Edition.

All employees are invited to attend the 8th annual Best Places to Work luncheon on March 1st at the Hyatt Buffalo Niagara Hotel.  All companies will even have a shot to win the Business First award for “best dressed company.”

DIGITS LLC is honored to be a finalist within the 2012 Business First Best Places to Work.

Product Overview