Attend this seminar to earn credits to renew your SAFE membership for 2024 and renew your CFDE certification.

Speaker: Professor Sarah Morris

Topic: Wash, Rinse, Detect: Sarah’s Dive into the Quirky

Abstract:

90% of cases involve some form of digital device or data. With the rise in IoT devices, it is no surprise that such devices are therefore cropping up during criminal, civil, corporate, and intelligence investigations. When media reports on device security it often focuses on the data being transmitted/received by the device. However, the data the device stores are often less secure and provide a wealth of information about your activity.

Sarah is a Professor at the University of Southampton and tends to get the ‘weird and wonderful’ casework jobs. In particular usual devices and datasets where something seems ‘odd’. In this presentation, Sarah will be discussing some of her more unusual past cases, including investigating a Smart Washing Machine. She will discuss how these cases led to her designing and applying research techniques to extract information from the device to help with the active investigations. Her casework not only led to actionable intelligence, but the research led to Sarah developing a new framework for acquisition which has been used in a range of casework by various investigation units.

Bio:

Professor Sarah Morris is a Professor of Digital Forensics at the University of Southampton. Sarah is based in the Cyber Security group within the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), where she was also appointed as ECS Director of Enterprise. As well as traditional academic activities, Sarah is casework active and has worked on cases assisting law enforcement, civil, corporate, media organizations and celebrity clients. One of her most intriguing cases involved recovering evidence from a smart washing machine. This case led to her being interviewed on BBC World Service and Radio 4. Sarah has also performed a binary level digital investigation of documents to support a CNN exclusive news story relating to Covid-19. Sarah has had numerous dealings with the government in the field of digital forensics, including being part of round table discussions and giving evidence at the House of Lords Forensic Science Enquiry in 2019. In October 2021, Sarah was appointed to the Biometrics and Forensics Ethics Group (BFEG), a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Home Office. Sarah also sits as a member of the UK Police Science Council.