Question

Computer Forensics Porn Scanner Program needed

Asked by: lucbruneau

Im investigating a computer by which have found child porn and other explicit questionable material. Im looking for a good computer program..beit free or for purchase that can be used to scan the computer and give me results in terms of the porn related material as well as dates involved for the viewings. The computer has only the one logon...and trying to find the time a user was on the computer and try to reference the time the explicit websites were views..Perhaps future programs suggested would be great for monitoring...This laptop is at a remote site so it has to be accessed remotely. Thanks

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Asked On
2009-06-18 at 08:47:01ID24503004
Tags

Pornography

,

computer forensics. porn scanner

Topics

Internet Security

,

Digital Forensics

,

Networking Security Vulnerabilities

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Answers

 

by: Pearl_export_benPosted on 2009-06-18 at 09:29:39ID: 24659051

Can you RDP the machine?

If so - I used to use EASEUS Data recovery.  It can scan a hard drive even after format and recover data quite quickly and easily either to its original location or to a new one.

i would recommend installing this on the machine and connecting with an RDP session which shows your drives.  Then you can recover cross-network to your machine.  I know this will mean you have the stuff on your machine - but it also means you will have all the data you need (the software produces a log of origin and destination for recovered files) to show to the police.

Ben

 

by: lucbruneauPosted on 2009-06-18 at 10:47:48ID: 24659938

Ooops i apologize,,i have the laptop in posession at the moment...I should have been clear that in the future the laptop would be in a remote place so to view logs or any info would be nice that way..For now i am just looking to pull all traces of information regarding dates, pictures, website links..temp files....And looking for a scanning program that can facilitate finding all explicit info and logging dates. Im really trying to tie in the users with the time that the explicit material was put on the computer.

 

by: Pearl_export_benPosted on 2009-06-18 at 10:58:35ID: 24660045

Like i said before... use Easeus and you will be able to recover the files along with the dates they were originally created.  In the future you will have to remote/vnc the machiine and repeat the process as there is no known software to do what you want.

You could try logginig internet activity i suppose.  Look at Microsoft ISA server or web logging software to see what your users accessed

 

by: lucbruneauPosted on 2009-06-18 at 12:53:28ID: 24661169

Pearl im not looking for data recovery...Im looking for a program to scan for anything relating to porn....A porn scanner...All the data is easily recoverable ..i want basically a program that searches for all criteria based on porn related information. Thats it

 

by: CheVive92626Posted on 2009-06-18 at 13:05:29ID: 24661287

Assuming you know how to address your remote connection requirement (e.g., via RDC), I'd recommend using Nirsoft's IEHistoryView v1.40 <www.nirsoft.net/utils/iehv.html>. Download and run it on the host computer, configure and create (in HTML) the desired report, and then upload it to some off-site location you control. The dates and times your target accessed the porn sites, and the duration s/he spent there will be clear as day.

 

by: jahboitePosted on 2009-06-19 at 03:38:02ID: 24665140

Whilst I don't think that there is a dedicated scanner for finding porn (imagine how difficult it would be for a computer to detect whether something is porn or not) there are products which can be used to extract content from a computer in such a way as to be useful in a court of law.  

One that comes to mind is EnCase forensic
http://www.guidancesoftware.com/computer-forensics-ediscovery-software-digital-evidence.htm
which is an industry leader in forensic software and would allow you to create an image of the machine and then perform a forensic analysis of the image.

Personally I think it would be impossible to tie in the actions of a specific person to content found on their machine - they could simply say they forgot to log-off and someone else must have used it - you could probably not prove otherwise.

 

by: Admin3kPosted on 2009-06-19 at 06:25:41ID: 24666084

Try the Digitasl Forensics section for Backtrack.

you can use the VMware version or the USB one, tools like Foremost, Autopsy ,Scalplel & Magic rescuse can do wonders here, there is even an entire section for Image acquiring & file system scavenging that could really recover deleted files (including cleared history, deleted cache,etc..) with a great accuracy level.

please take the time to read the documentation of the tools first before using them, as this release is targetted to security professionals, pen testers & computer forensics analysts, they can cause damage to the file system or network if abused or improperly used.

P.S: Proper Forensics investigation would require to obtain the computer physically, this will ensure you are able to access or recover anything directly from Disk while bypassing any filesystem, OS or third partty software restrictions that may exist.

 

by: breadtanPosted on 2009-06-20 at 02:58:24ID: 24673076

Maybe for a start, to track user login and establish audit trail, take a look at setting machine policy
(See a brief description in the link below - check logon events). For central and global policy effect, push down can be done at server end (for all domain joined clients)

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid192_gci1033853_mem1,00.html

As for scavenging on target HDD, the above experts has already named quite a list of establish and well known ones. They fit the bills but the key challenge for you is more of how to identify porn rather and collate gathered evidence automatically than manual analysis. Well, maybe through (related) keywords search, search known blacklist sites (used commonly by internet filters), using categorised "objectionable" database....I see that this involve in-depth content analysis system.

Check out
a) VIMA Technologies (search/filter images) - http://www.vimatech.com/products.htm

"VIMA's PBIR uses perception-based analysis - our patented process - to break an image down into more than 150 parameters, much as the human brain does........By analyzing the characteristics of both selected and unselected images, PBIR infers the user's intention. This ability to be taught user preferences is exclusive to VIMA's products, as is the technology's capacity to distinguish between nude pornography and nude artwork."

b) Real-Time Website Profiler (leverage on existing rich content categories and proxying web traffic, see the image in the site) - http://www.safesquid.com/html/portal.php?page=132

These are long term solution that you may want to consider but if not as of now I believe manual keyword search on the objectionable material is one workaround (not 100% efficient though especially on image file)

Hope it helps

 

by: breadtanPosted on 2009-06-20 at 03:07:33ID: 24673105

Having said above, forgot to include another tool that you will be interested in.
- File Audit from Guardware (it run off the thumbdrive and no software need to install, provide also incident report ...) - http://www.guardware.com/ts_overview.php

"....a turnkey solution for identifying potentially pornographic images, video and music stored on Windows-based PCs and Laptops. It runs on a compact and portable USB (thumb) drive that allows IT or HR managers to audit computers for inappropriate usage and unauthorized file storage. "

Related solution is an offline classifier system called URLChecker (not as relevant as targeting ISP but still good to know)- http://www.guardware.com/ulc_overview.php

Hope it helps

 

by: GlkeanPosted on 2009-07-26 at 09:01:25ID: 24946378

ProDiscover Basic (among other trial and freeware forensics tools) will allow you to clone the drive by creating an image. This will allow you to inspect the drive at your leisure without having to remote access the drive later. These programs all use hash algorithms to determine an exact copy was made, they also will copy all free and slack space so you will have access to deleted images. There are also programs that will try to grab all pornographic images by running an algorithm that detects skin colors and searches for extensive bare skin, but I wouldn't bother to use them, just inspect the drive an look at all image files as no algorithm is 100%. The best way, and the most time consuming, is to look at everything on the drive. If the suspect was slightly clever they may have renamed the extensions of the images (jpg to txt for example) to avoid detection.

 

by: GlkeanPosted on 2009-07-26 at 09:04:02ID: 24946385

Forgot to mention, make sure you use a write blocker when inspecting the drive or using a scanner. If your scanner changes the access date of the file, it will be unusable in a civil, professional, or criminal case. If the date is changed your suspect could easily say that you planted the files.

 

by: carrzkissPosted on 2009-08-23 at 19:25:24ID: 25165292

Just found these, not sure if this is what you are wanting.
http://www.contentpurity.com/scaninfo.htm
http://www.mediadetective.com/porn-scan.html

There are probably more.
Good luck
Carrzkiss

 

by: kickenchicken57Posted on 2009-09-09 at 06:16:41ID: 25290871

First off, if this is a forensic investigation you should not be accessing the system by booting it up and poking around. You should acquire an image of the hard drive preferably in a dd format. One method that you could use is to disconnect the suspect computers drive and attach it to your investigation system via a hardware write blocker and create the dd image using FTK Imager Lite which is free and can be found here:

http://www.accessdata.com/downloads/current_releases/imager/Imager%20Lite%202.6.1.zip

Once you have acquired a dd image of the drive you can use this with most forensic tools to do your investigation. One tool that I would recommend is X-Ways Forensics. It is a great tool that offers a feature they call skin color detection. Taken from their site here is a description of the feature:

"Skin color detection (e.g. a gallery view sorted by skin color percentage greatly accelerates a search for traces of child pornography)"

It costs 748.90 Euros for the Forensic Edition which is roughly $1,085 US dollars. and can be found at:

http://www.x-ways.net/forensics/index-m.html

This tool will give you the ability to recover deleted files and find files with renamed extensions, such as jpegs renamed to .txt files for example. You can then use the skin color detection to sort all of the found images by their percentage of skin colors contained within the image.

After finding all of the images that you are interested in you can use the freely available SANS Investigative Forensic Toolkit (SIFT) Workstation found at:

https://computer-forensics2.sans.org/community/downloads/

It is a Linux distribution that comes installed in a virtual machine. You will need VMWare Workstation to run it and you can download a 30 day evaluation here:

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=workstation-w

Using the SANS Investigative Forensic Toolkit (SIFT) Workstation you can create a timeline of file activity that can show you other activity that may have happened around the same time that the images were accessed/created/modified. You can then use these times to check against the times that a user loggged on to determine what user account is responsible for the activity.

 

by: walteralexanderPosted on 2009-09-15 at 11:24:48ID: 25337720

I have used Media Detective and Snitch (basically the same program) to scan machines for porn.  They "read" images (JPG, MPG, etc) and look for fleshtones, etc.  Overall they work pretty good.  Some false positive, but definitely usable.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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