July 2013

This month appears to be somewhat hectic, several issues had to be solved together. We bought a new house and sold our previous apartment within 3 weeks (and actually had to leave it within 2 weeks), so it was a somewhat hectic month. Before August 1st I also submit a workshop proposal on morphometrics and one or two papers on camera identification in big data and maybe some research on biometric comparison of hands.

I also reviewed several nice papers, and see that the field of digital investigation is attracting lots of attention and some good research of universities is being conducted. Also I did several proficiency tests and it appears that you always learn something of doing these. I think for any forensic scientist it is good to do a proficiency test at least once a year. Also casework and reports, and in the summer I will continue to be at the office.

This month I also received new medical equipment that I had to use. A glucose meter which can be connected to the internet, very easy for telemedicine. It seems many of those meters are sold, and they also might provide forensic information. One sees that the number of medical devices to be used at homes is growing rapidly, however what happens if the meter is hacked from distance. As we can see from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjwuA60jIDI the meter can be hacked and this might cause wrong readings. When driving a car a hypo might occur due to that and this might in theory cause a fatal accident. We can see more devices such as ICDs where these scenarios are discussed http://blog.ioactive.com/2013/02/broken-hearts-how-plausible-was.html . Also with CPAP-devices for sleeping disorders possibilities exist to reprogram them, which also might cause as least a change of mood. In the information of the manufacturer no information is given yet on possibilities of these attacks.

Perhaps these scenarios are somewhat remote, however from 31 July to 4 August in the Netherlands the hacking conference OHM2013 is organized. There will be a forensic track from the NFI at https://ohm2013.org/wiki/Village:Garrison and I am looking forward to be there, however will not bring any medical electronic devices there, since you never know.