This is a contract position for four months starting in May 2023. We are looking for an experienced Digital Learning Developer who will be responsible for working closely with our Digital Learning Manager to deliver the build of a future online course for Control-F.

About You

You’ll be an experienced Digital Learning Developer with demonstrable experience and a good level of competency in using Articulate 360, in particular Articulate Storyline.

In addition, you’ll need demonstrable experience of Vyond as well as an understanding of various e-learning course formats, SCORM, xAPI and cmi5.

If you have design experience and are able to contribute to the design and development of content, that would be extremely useful but not essential.

You’ll be creative and able to work with a forward-thinking mindset. It’s not enough that something you build works for right now – we want to make sure it’s future-proofed (insofar as is possible).

We’re looking for someone self-motivated, with good project management skills and the ability to work to agreed timescales. Ideally, you’ll have experience of working remotely although depending on location, there is the possibility of you spending some time in our offices and/or meeting up with the Digital Learning Manager to discuss progress against agreed objectives.

Overall, you’ll have a high degree of comfort working in a collaborative and rapidly changing environment.

What’s involved

You’ll take a combination of storyboard designs and textual specifications for course materials and transfer them into Articulate Storyline to develop the interactive course content.

You’ll also use animation software tools like Vyond to generate media-related content for use throughout the course. We see this as being a significant part of the project, where an understanding of blending both Vyond and Storyline content would be advantageous.

You’ll be given brand guidelines and direction on art style and we’d like you to be able to add some graphic design elements to the material, with some opportunities and freedom for creative suggestions and solutions.

It’s important to know that while we have our own inhouse style that we’ll expect you to work to, you’ll need to be comfortable working within guidelines that are currently evolving and being updated to meet our latest vision.

The challenges

If you’re not used to working with a client remotely, we realise that could present a challenge initially and we’ll do what we can to make sure that the working relationship goes smoothly.

We’ve already highlighted that our inhouse style is undergoing a review and update, so that will be part of the challenge for you when you work with us.

About Us

Control-F is a digital forensics company offering scheduled and on-site training courses to digital forensic examiners, primarily in law enforcement. We are a small business with a big reputation and our team are driven and motivated to achieve and maintain our high standards.

The future

There is a possibility of a digital learning role on an employed basis and we would be delighted to discuss this future role with you if it was of interest.

If you’re passionate about digital forensics and want to educate and inspire others, maybe you’re the person we’re looking for….

Recovering web activity from a mobile device will be important in many investigations. Which sites has the user visited? Which pages on those sites did they access? What searches did they run?

Although pre-installed browsers like Safari and Chrome are well supported by commercial forensic tools, there is a very real chance that web activity in other apps could easily be missed during a forensic examination. A user might be accessing the web via a wide range of apps, and in some cases not even realising that they are doing so:

• A user may have installed a 3rd party web browser and chosen to use it instead of, or alongside, Safari or Chrome
• Apps like Outlook, Twitter and Instagram default to launching their own “in app browser” when users click on links within the app (e.g. within a direct message, tweet or post)
• Many apps which aren’t web browsers in the traditional sense, access data on the web  (and record their activity) – for example a parking app, a cinema app etc.

Our experience indicates that all three of these scenarios may mean that there is web activity on the device which might be extracted, but has not been decoded by commercial forensic tools.

However, we have good news!

Many Android apps utilise the open-source Chromium framework when they access the web – which means that lots of different apps are generating very similar (and decodable) artefacts.

In order to be allowed on the iOS App Store, all apps which browse the web must be based on the WebKit framework – again this means that different apps will produce similar artefacts.

We have released “shomium“, an open-source tool for locating, decoding and reporting web activity on mobile devices. It quickly identifies Chromium-based apps within full file system extractions of Android devices, and likewise alerts the user to Webkit-based apps within extractions of iOS devices.

Users can browse contents of the application’s web cache, decoded cookies and “local storage” and then generate HTML reports to pass to case officers and investigation teams.

You can download shomium from our GitHub repository now. We hope that it helps raise awareness of web activity which might otherwise “fly under the radar”. We welcome your feedback!

We’ve been delighted with the response from our customers to our entry-level Mobile Device Repair training which launched in July 2020. We were extremely busy during 2021 teaching delegates how to replace screens, repair data ports, power devices with dead batteries and much more.

Delegates have been asking us for “next level” training to help diagnose and repair more complex faults and we’re delighted to be able to announce new training address exactly that.

Intermediate Mobile Device Repair is a brand new 4½ day training course designed to teach delegates how to identify and repair common board-level faults which may prevent a device from powering on, or to “boot-loop” (repeated display of the Apple logo).

You can find more information about the course at www.controlf.net/imdr/

Our first course runs 23-27 May 2022 in Leeds.

Get in touch to check availability or to find out more about the course content.

We’re delighted to announce the release of a new online training programme targeted at operators of mobile forensic kiosks. Mobile Forensics for Kiosk Operators is a vendor-neutral online “on-demand” training course which means that it can be attended by delegates from any Internet-connected PC and at a time and pace of their choice.

Mobile Forensics for Kiosk Operators is designed to complement rather than replace product training from a kiosk vendor. Using easy to follow and visually engaging materials, the course steps delegates through fundamentals of mobile forensics: network isolation, locations of data on the device, logical vs. physical extractions, CSP data requests and much more. The course comprises approximately 1½ days worth of content and includes tests on the content of each module (certificates are automatically generated for successful candidates).

We realise that one size does not always fit all and for that reason we are offering the option of tailoring (by Control-F) an additional lesson in order to appropriately reflect organisation-specific policies and procedures.

You can find out more about the course at www.controlf.net/mfko or get in touch to enquire about free trial access to the course for evaluation purposes.