I am a little late to this discussion, so forgive me if I am restating previous issues, but given I have had some practical experience in this arena, and have trained well over 3,000 cops worldwide on cyber investigative techniques, let me add: (1) Any log data that can be printed out can be successfully introduced as evidence in a US court trial (assuming the Attorney is competent). (2) Any log maintained in the "normal course of business" falls under the hearsay exception and can easily be admitted into evidence. (3) Any log evidence that is created/acquired as a "result" of an investigation into the source of a compromise can be challenged, but (as mentioned) if there no indications that the original document/log file created (or a true and accurate copy) was not tampered with, then it will be difficult from keeping it being introduced as evidence. (4) Most challenges to any forensic computer data pivot on the chain of custody and the methodology used to gather/discover it, as opposed to the original data itself. Until then... Bill Spernow, CISSP Chief Information Security Officer Georgia Student Finance Commission (w) 770-724-9328 (f) 770-724-9004 cisoat_private (business) bill.spernowat_private (personal) -----Original Message----- From: jamie rishaw [mailto:jrishawat_private] Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 4:13 PM To: Tina Bird Cc: Log Analysis Mailing List Subject: Re: [logs] Data for Court On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 04:11:13AM -0600, Tina Bird wrote: > Hi all -- I've spent some of my time on airplanes reading > the US Dept. of Justice report on Evidence Quality Computer > Data (the link is on the Web site). I won't go into great > detail (I'm >loving< European central heating), but the thing > I found the most interesting is that, despite all the great > discussions about how easy it is to modify log data, > >unless< there's reasonable proof that logs have been > modified, they can be admitted as evidence. > > Even better, they're generally held to be reliable evidence > if the business submitting them collects them as part of > normal practice and relies upon their information for its > day-to-day activity. Exactly. What's important (from what I'm learning from @Stake, an imho great security organization) is that the company has what's recognized as a baseline of what's "normal". One @stake staffer wrote to me in an e-mail on this exact topic: --snip-- The first goal any conscious security professional should achieve is a aperture database. An aperture into your technical and corporate environment, that is captured by a matrix of what a corporation has and the "cause" (function) vs. "reaction" for each of the respective assets. In doing so one has established a baseline for what normal is. On a network, a high level example would be ...2 exchange mail servers : pop mail protocol (110) , internal and external uses. For auditing purposes, one can accumulate 12 months of logs filtered on the mail server that outline only port 110 was used from the following internal IP addresses over the course of the last year. As you have defined what is normal, then justified the statement with substantial evidence (time stamped logs that were protected and uncorrupted {the security measure put in place to protect the logging server was ample}), now when an incident happens and one is scrubbing through sanitized data and isolates an invalid IP address that accessed the mail server on port 22 at the same time that your router's logs, firewalls, etc...noticed anomalies compared to your aperture...the information is painted in a different light. --snip-- Hope this helps a little. jamie -- jamie rishaw <jamieat_private> sr. wan/unix engineer/ninja // playboy enterprises inc. [opinions stated are mine, and are not necessarily those of the bunny] "UNIX was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things." -- Doug Gwyn --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: loganalysis-unsubscribeat_private For additional commands, e-mail: loganalysis-helpat_private --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: loganalysis-unsubscribeat_private For additional commands, e-mail: loganalysis-helpat_private
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Dec 17 2001 - 10:48:44 PST