Author: Doug Metz

Play it Again Sam – A Recap of MUS 2022

CTF, DFIR, Presentations

I had a wonderful time participating in the Magnet User Summit, both in person and virtually. After 2 years of participating virtually, it was my first time attending the Summit in person. It was great to meet for the first time in person, not just many of my coworkers, but many of the regulars in my Twitter stream as well. What a gathering of brilliant, yet equally humble, investigators.

During the Summit I participated on a panel about Bringing your Forensics Lab to the Cloud. I also had fun co-presenting on two talks, Walkthrough of a BEC (Business Email Compromise) and. Walkthrough of a Ransomware Investigation, where we looked at the examinations from a Law Enforcement and from a corporate perspective.

There was the surreal moment of realizing that the boss doesn’t just rock, he ROCKS!

This year there was an in person and a virtual CTF with separate evidence and challenges. For the in-person CTF we examined a Linux laptop and an iPhone. Also, the long anticipated Dark Mode is a treat for the retinas.

For the virtual CTF the evidence sources were a Windows image and an Android mobile device, and a Google TakeOut. I surprised myself with how well I did on the Android and that hasn’t been my area of expertise.

During the virtual summit I enjoyed sharing my presentation, Free Tools for DFIR Triage Collections. Special thanks to everyone who engaged with me during and after the presentations, and from all different time zones. Your support was very much appreciated. If you missed it during the Summit or want to watch it again, you can head over to the Presentations page.

You can also check out all the other recorded presentations from the 2022 Magnet User Summit via the link below.

Magnet Summit 2022 Replays

Swag for Charity

DFIR

You can now get Baker Street Forensics swag, everything from shirts and stickers to onesies and pillows. I’m especially fond of the notebooks. I worked with a number of independent artists to commission a few new logo designs. This is where I need your help.

  1. What’s your favorite of the designs? The winner will be the default logo for bakerstreetforensics.com
  2. All proceeds from the sales will be donated to charity. Do you have a charity you’d like to nominate? The charity with the most votes will receive the proceeds.
Option 1: Original logo
Option 2: Deerstalker
Option 3: Print
Option 4: Sherlockian

Let me know your votes with a comment below, then visit the merch page, or click here to go direct to the store. Thank you for your support.

DIY Home Network Rack – the Lack Rack

DIY
When I started this project I never expected to be the #1 search result for “Lack Rack”, but here we are.

View all the Lack Rack series posts from inception through design updates.

https://bakerstreetforensics.com/tag/lack-rack

I’ve got an abundance of equipment in my home office/lab. I’d been contemplating doing a rack setup for a while but all of the options I was looking at were above budget for what I wanted to spend. Also, while I liked the idea of the functionality of a rack I wasn’t too keen on how a tower of metal would go with the décor. Then I stumbled across the “Lack Rack.”

Here’s what I used: (All in it was about $110.)

Depending on how many tiers you want to do you can adjust the number of tables. Remember you’ll need one extra for the base.

The Plan:

There’s the expression, “Measure twice, cut once.” With me it’s more like measure 4 times. Measure the components you plan to include, adding in room for the rack shelves as well.

the original design plan.

Assembly:

Secure the casters to the bottom of one of the tabletops. Casters should be about 3/4 inch from the corners. Center them over where the mounting holes for the legs are.

For the lowest level, I used the full length of the table legs. So just build the table as per the instructions (screw in the legs).

Next, start stacking. I used a little bit of Gorilla glue on the bottom of the legs and attached it to the wheeled base. 4 steel braces were also used to secure the legs to the base.

The next set of legs are going to be cut shorter. Wrapping the area where you’re cutting with painters tape helps the edges from getting brittle. Power saw is probably easier but in this case a hack saw sufficed.

Add the shortened legs to the next top. Attach the short table to the previous level with steel braces. Note due to the legs being hollow at the bottom there is no glue securing the upper tiers.

Secure the metal rack shelves to the legs of below the table tops. You’ll want to keep them pretty close to the top as only about the top 2″ of the legs are solid to drill into.

Stack and secure.

Add another table stack to the top and it’s all done.

Here it is all loaded up. There’s a lot of space to add components still. There’s a switch on one of the shelves between the tiers. Also, though not currently utilized as such, all the shelves can support full 19″ network/rack hardware so as resources grow, I’ll have plenty of room to accommodate.