Silicon Prairie Cyber Services' Blog

Current Situation. I'm just sitting here taking notes about my case notes from a recent iPhone exam. It's not uncommon for me to do this, especially when the case is huge and I've had to dig through lots of different artifacts.  Now, you're wondering why my case notes are so disorganized. They're not. I was following the evidence. They're organized in that fashion. The problem is that looking for and finding the answer to one question can often leads to more questions - probably 3 to 5 more questions. I keep going down the rabbit hole looking for answers to the question. Sometimes I have to jump back up to the top once I've either found the answer or realize it was just a shiny object and should have never been followed. Knowing what doesn't relate to the case can be just as important as the things that do. Why do I do this? Why am I taking notes about my notes? I'm backing farther out and looking at the case from the 10,000 foot view. This helps me ...

 I made a little action figure of myself, and in the process, AI taught me about its bias.  The first action figure has a smile that is waaay too much, a little psychotic IMO. I said reduce the smile by 20%. That's all I said. Then, I looked at what happened in the second picture AI made. No smile, flat hair, an examiner who looks utterly depressed. AI like so many before it are still saying you better smile buttercup. I can even show the bias. Take a look here.     The first graphic   The second graphic With a 20% smile reduction...

  Why is being a dispassionate scientist one of the core traits of a digital forensics examiner? ✔ We must objectively analyze all of the evidence ✔ We must clearly present the facts of the case ✔ Our opinions are informed by the facts, not by our personal feelings or judgments Being a dispassionate scientist allows us to follow the evidence to find all the facts in the case. Good or bad.

  AI has its place. But it's not conducting my digital forensic exam for me. It's not writing the report for me either. It's not doing homework for students either. You have to have a fundamental knowledge of a subject to leverage AI in any meaningful and accurate way. We're starting to see some big pitfalls in those organizations that dumped people and went all in on AI to do work. Hopefully, that's your big hint to double down on learning and increasing your own knowledge instead of being a copy-paste pro. Otherwise, if we don't use our brains, we survived Judgement Day in 1997 / 2004 only to submit to the machines a few decades later.