As everyone knows, mobile digital devices and the data contained on these devices is here to stay. I do not think anyone ever thought a small mobile telephone would ever fade away, but the growth of the tech is another story. I would argue Moore’s Law is challenged by the smart-device’s of today with growth of components exceeding any expectation. This frequently used compounding yardstick in tech is often the driving force behind mobile device manufacturing and research. As the article suggests these companies are really competing against themselves – determined to build a better digital mousetrap. Honestly, the mousetrap is built to mesmerize the consumer into a yearly upgrade. Upgrading our tech to keep up with the technological advances steamrolling across the globe is often mind boggling; far exceeding any manufactures’ forecast. Yes, we digital consumers must have the newest tech – no matter the probability the tech will be outdated at the time of release. This inundation of tech is often a tsunami, but is what creates the digital landscape of our lives.
The digital finger print in our everyday lives is nothing short of amazing – from computerized kitchens, cars, homes and businesses our lives have been immersed and essentially governed by tech. Just contemplating the likelihood of not interacting with some form of programmable tech every day is an impossibility – just Google it!
What about our global digital landscape – is that any different? Our nations, our countries, our world are attached to a digital grid with exponential growth and potential; often controlled, captured, manipulated and infiltrated. Preparing for tomorrow with innovation, organization and leading edge leadership today is a necessity. This means tech is not going to wait for our ok to advance, or to gain knowledge on how it operates, stores data, sends data or hides data. Tech will continue to compound without our ok, and the digital landscape will continue to encompass even more of our daily lives. It is not the self-reliance on tech that is alarming, but more the self-imposed ignorance that data within the tech actually exists that is chilling. Proactive conversation and understanding rather than reactive pretext and conjecture is how to navigate the evolving global digital landscape.
Today we need forward thinking, thought leaders with a unique set of problem solving skills. These should be baseline traits of the digital forensic road warrior of today. In order to combat this digital environment one cannot wait for a better tool, feature or method, but take the lead and build it, devise it or craft it. This was the idea behind not only my book, Mobile Forensics Investigation: A Guide to Evidence Collection, Analysis, and Presentation, but also the SQLQuery Builder application.
The Mobile Forensics Investigation (MFI) book is a way for any examiner to gain a better angle and understanding of completing a holistic mobile device examination without reliance on automation. The SQLQuery Builder gives the power to the user to create powerful queries to collect and extract from SQLite database files used throughout the digital world to store valuable evidence. Using both of these in conjunction with any digital investigation hopefully can start to fill the technology awareness chasm.
Today’s digital examiner is facing an onslaught of data from the massive number of digital endpoints, which are constantly barraged by an endless supply of both malicious and benign information. Being proactive and not reactive in our investigative approach can help to overcome our already extraordinary forensic deficit. However, this is entirely up to you..
