“Guns and Tactics magazine and InSights Training Center give some easy to remember and practical pistol shooting advice while showcasing our newest shooting bay!”

In this brand new series and very first episode of “Tactical Moment” featuring John Holschen from InSights Training Center they begin with the most practical advice you can start with: proper pistol grip.

If you like this series, please let us know and we’ll continue to provide more like this as well as other firearms related information professional investigators can use!

A special thanks to our friends at Guns and Tactics Magazine for producing quality content!

For those of you who have never heard of Maltego before, let me give you an idea what this tool can do. From the publisher’s website at http://Paterva.com:

“The unique perspective that Maltego offers to both network and resource based entities is the aggregation of information posted all over the internet – whether it’s the current configuration of a router poised on the edge of your network or the current whereabouts of your Vice President on his international visits, Maltego can locate, aggregate and visualize this information.

What does Maltego do?

Maltego is a program that can be used to determine the relationships and real world links between:

• People
• Groups of people (social networks)
• Companies
• Organizations
• Web sites
• Internet infrastructure such as: Domains, DNS Names, Netblocks, IP Addresses, etc.
• Phrases
• Affiliations
• Documents and files

These entities are all linked using open source intelligence and provides you with a graphical interface that makes seeing these relationships instant and accurate – making it possible to see hidden connections, even if they are three or four degrees of separation away.

What can Maltego do for me?

Maltego can be used for the information gathering phase of all security related work. It will save you time and will allow you to work more accurately and smarter.

Maltego aids you in your thinking process by visually demonstrating interconnected links between searched items.

Maltego provide you with a much more powerful search, giving you smarter results.

If access to “hidden” information determines your success, Maltego can help you discover it.“

For me, the beauty is in being able to run large lists of people, websites and companies through the visualizer and find hidden connections between them all! The real power is that I can input all kids of data into it: People, Email Addresses, Websites, Company Names, Dates and Times of Events, Addresses, Telephone Numbers, Business Networks, etc. etc. and it magically finds ways to correlate all of this disparate data in VERY interesting and eye-opening ways.

I’m seriously not kidding! I would go as far to say that Maltego is changing the way I conduct Corporate and Economic Intelligence assignments altogether.

“Maltego lets just about anybody do the kind of data mining that in the past only fraud investors, government specialists and hackers typically could do.”

Perhaps The Ethical Hacker Network said it best “”Maltego, is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way. Coupled with its graphing libraries, Maltego, allows you to identify key relationships between information and identify previously unknown relationships between them. It is a must-have tool in the forensics, security and intelligence fields!“

TEHN also has a great set of instructions (though a bit dated now that v.3 was released) and actual case studies on Maltego’s practical applications at http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/202/24/

Essentially, this is data-mining and data-correlation (finding the connection) which is the basis for the Intelligence Development Cycle!

Rick Gurley of Risk Management Research & Investments, Inc., a private investigation agency in Columbia, MO, has always been the guy I call when I not only want to add a new technology or forensics tool to my repertoire, but to understand its application as well. Adopting Maltego has been no different and he was kind enough to create this extremely useful video for me and then allow me to pass it along to all of you. It covers all of the basics of setting up and understanding the Maltego interface and how to work with some hidden features. This 15 minute video will save you weeks of banging your head against the wall trying to get the software working and moving in the right direction, should you decide to start using this powerful intelligence and networking analysis tool, too.

The video is actually best viewed in high definition on YouTube and at a larger screen size than I can include on this page, so click on the video and you will be taken to YouTube.

Thanks for the tutorial, Rick!

Here is some video of a fugitive recovery team from Detroit in a “Day in the life of…” news format. In spite of Duane “Dog” Chapman, how do you feel this particular news story portrays the current state of the bail enforcement profession?

I personally liked the fact that one investigator stressed safety and respect for those that they encounter but we found comments criticizing the report, too. Many professionals rail against the term “Bounty Hunter” these days and I can see that the agents’ use of the term “Search Warrant” when announcing their presence is a “no-no” because they might be giving the occupants inside the building the impression that they are law enforcement officers.

Good press or bad press? Watch the video and weigh in on this in the comments section below!

We would all like to believe that our clients (or their friends, enemies or… opposing counsel) would not change a report… but how many of us still believe in the Easter Bunny?

Next, you should consider compatibility. We convert our documents into a .pdf file. Adobe Reader is installed on greater than 99% of all computers purchased and solves the compatibility issue of the many competing file types… .doc, .docx, .rdf, .txt, .wps, .xml, .htm, .html, .jpg, .gif, .png, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Even if your client can open a document, it does not mean that he or she is seeing it exactly the way you intended because their software settings, viewing and layout, are probably different than yours. If you take pride in your work and take your time about the aesthetics of your presentation, .pdf’s ensure that what you see, is what the recipients of your documents are going to see.

Lastly, we convert documents into a .pdf due to “portability.” If you are going to send your report to the client via email or upload them to your website for download, then you should consider file size; .pdf’s are generally smaller in size than Word documents and, if you use Adobe Acrobat, there are options to reduce the file size even further.

If you don’t have the several hundred dollars laying around to pick up the latest version of Adobe Acrobat, our favorite FREE .pdf creation tool is “Primo .pdf.” http://www.primopdf.com/

One last thought on the subject of file size: optimize your photos! If you are including digital photo’s as exhibits in your document, then you should reduce not only the dimensions of your photos to fit the page but also the resolution; 96dpi is perfect for a standard report. Compress the image for even further reduction in file size. Work with copies of your digital photos and not the original files.

Here is a video demonstration of me reducing the file size of a sample report from 128MB to 2.75MB by compressing the included photographs:

Title:

Thursday – February 4, 2010
Noon Golf Outing
1-5 p.m. Executive Council Meeting
5-7 p.m. Registration
7-10 p.m. Hospitality Suite

Friday – February 5, 2010
7-7:30 a.m. Registration
7:45-5 p.m. Crime Scene Analysis
Education & Training on location
8 p.m. Outdoor Photography Workshop

Saturday – February 6, 2010
8-5 p.m. Accident Investigation
Education & Training on location
7 p.m. BBQ at Cottonwoods Resort

MEMBERS (NALI) (AALPI)
$225 EARLY Member Registration (by 12/1/2009)
$250 LATE Member Registration (after 12/1/2009)
$175 Golf Tournament

NON-MEMBERS
$250 EARLY Non-Member Registration (by 12/1/2009)
$275 LATE Non-Member Registration (after 12/1/2009)
$175 Golf Tournament

*Deadline For Registration is 12/31/2009 (Due to the requirements of the training sessions, registration MUST be made by deadline.)

Hotel Reservations
Scottsdale Cottonwoods Resort
6160 North Scottsdale Road
Scottsdale, AZ 85253
Phone: 877.334.3430
Fax: 480.951.2434

NALI Room Rate: $104.00

Call the hotel at 877-334-3430 for reservations

Start Date: 2010-02-04
End Date: 2010-02-06

“Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means “concealed writing”. The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.

The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. Plainly visible encrypted messages—no matter how unbreakable—will arouse suspicion, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal.[1] Therefore, whereas cryptography protects the contents of a message, steganography can be said to protect both messages and communicating parties.

Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. As a simple example, a sender might start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet, a change so subtle that someone not specifically looking for it is unlikely to notice it.“

Much appreciation to Nick Jossendal, video professional, for the video!

This article was prepared by L. Scott Harrell and is posted courtesy IRBseach, LLC.

IRBsearch offers The Most information, The Best data sources, and The Fastest delivery for locating people, businesses, and their assets. With one click you can search billions of records in just a fraction of a second.

His answer: “An unequivocal… maybe.”

What we like about Steve is his obvious technical knowledge and know-how, but mostly his gift for breaking down technical digital forensics concepts and putting them into plain language for the rest of us.

We hope he makes more videos! For more information and other great forensics articles visit his website- http://BurgessForensics.com

This article is posted courtesy IRBseach, LLC.

IRBsearch offers The Most information, The Best data sources, and The Fastest delivery for locating people, businesses, and their assets. With one click you can search billions of records in just a fraction of a second.

“A number of credit card companies now issue credit cards with embedded RFIDs (radio frequency ID tags), with promises of enhanced security and speedy transactions.” -From Boing Boing TV.