Vendor-neutral online training for kiosk operators

Mobile Forensics for Kiosk Operators course iconWe’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).

Screenshot of interactive SIM card exercise

An example interactive activity from the course

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.

Kevin Mansell’s monster fundraising bike ride

Photo of Kevin at the finish lineControl-F Managing Director is taking a day off today after riding 250km (155 miles) in the Dulux London Revolution cycle event at the weekend. Kevin was raising money for The Wave Project – a charity who help children build their self confidence and self esteem through surf therapy at 33 locations across the UK.

Over the past 10 years, surf therapy has become an established form of therapeutic support for both mental and physical health. It is recognised by the NHS in the UK as an effective form of therapy for children and young people at risk of mental ill-health and is also used by the Police and Blue Light services as therapy for serving officers and professionals.

You can read more about why Kevin chose to support The Wave Project at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/kevin-mansell1

Classroom training re-opens Monday 12th April

In light of recent government announcements, we are delighted to announce that we will be restarting classroom training from Monday 12th April 2021.

Just as with our restart last year, we have taken the necessary steps to ensure that our classroom environment is “Covid Secure” and delegates should be assured that appropriate social distancing and hygiene measures are in place.

Our course schedule has never been more “dynamic” so please do check the latest schedule here. We are constantly responding to customer demand and adding new course dates to try and reduce waiting times. Please get in touch to check the latest availability.

We are recruiting

Control-F is now looking for a Technical Specialist to join our small but growing team. We need someone to take responsibility for research and development, ensuring that both training and service offerings are leading edge.

Find out more about the role here.

Re-opening our Wyboston classroom

As lockdown measures are gradually being reduced in the UK, we have been working on preparing our Wyboston Lakes classroom for a return to active service. We are currently planning on our first post-lockdown classroom course being Foundation in Mobile Phone Forensics running 15th-19th June 2020. As you can imagine we have been busy conducting risk assessments, sorting accommodation provision and adapting our classroom for social distancing.

By means of a brief update:

  • Onsite accommodation with dinner and breakfast included is available on the Wyboston Lakes site (contact us for rates and booking details)
  • We will initially be running Wyboston courses at 50% capacity to ensure we can achieve 2m social distancing in the classroom
  • We will be implementing a frequent cleaning programme for contact points in the building during the training day
  • Each delegate will be provided with their own hand sanitiser (70% alcohol) and anti-bacterial wipes to keep their work area clean and safe
  • We will be restricting movement of both trainers and students within the classroom to maintain social distancing
  • To assist students we will be making use of remote control software to allow students to communicate any technical problems to their trainer and for the trainer to take control remotely in order to help troubleshoot
  • Disposable face coverings will be made available (optional) to delegates who wish to use them
  • We are using hazard tape and increased signage to help raise awareness of safe working distances and practices

 

You can check our course schedule page to find out when and where our courses are running. We will be announcing plans for our Leeds classroom shortly but our expectation is that our Mobile Device Repair course on 20th-24th July will be our first “post lockdown” course in Leeds.

Please get in touch if you would like more information or have any questions regarding our plans for restarting classroom training.

Instructor-led online training available to book

We’re delighted to announce that our new App Investigator 1 training course is now available to book as an instructor-led live online programme.

Based on our well established and extremely popular Smartphone App Forensics course, App Investigator 1 provides delegates with both the theory and hands-on skills required to recover and interpret app data from SQLite databases and Property List (plist) files. The emphasis of App Investigator 1 is on being able to decode any app and greatly reduce the time required to produce a report which can be passed to an investigator. Because SQLite databases are used so widely across desktop operating systems, desktop apps and devices such as TVs and in-car systems, the skills learned on the course can be applied more broadly in digital forensics than purely mobile device investigations.

Our first scheduled App Investigator 1 course runs 29 June – 3 July 2020.

Further details, including pricing, can be found on the App Investigator 1 course page on our website.

 

 

Free tutorials on our new YouTube channel

We’ve been teaching our delegates how to make sense of binary and hexadecimal for many years both during training courses and event workshops. We’ve always received good feedback on those sessions from delegates and so we felt that it made sense to share our explanations of these fundamental concepts more widely.

We’ve recently launched a Control-F YouTube channel where you can find tutorial videos which explain binary and hexadecimal in (we hope!) a simple way.

We’ll be directing our students to them as preparation for their classroom training and hope that the videos are helpful resources for the wider digital forensics community (and beyond).

Do get in touch if you’ve found them useful and with any suggestions for future tutorials you’d like to see.

Join our Combating Data Hiding Techniques webinar (Thu 21 May 2pm BST)

 

Thanks to those who supported last week’s “Making Sense of Android Encryption” webinar (recorded version available here). We’re keeping the band together and have another show for you.

We will be hosting a free webinar on Thursday May 21st at 2pm British Summer Time entitled:

“Combating Data Hiding Techniques on Mobile Devices”

in which we’ll explore Samsung Secure Folder, Huawei App Lock and Huawei Private Space. We’ll also describe how we supported a law enforcement customer with decrypting data from a 3rd party vault app.

Simply follow the link below to register:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6415894655968/WN_KqT9dxeRQWKZfgtD90izcQ

We hope you can join us!

Join our Android Encryption webinar (Thu 7 May 2pm BST)

 

Last week’s “Cloud Forensics Primer” webinar was very well attended (recorded version available here), and so we’re hosting another next week.

We will be hosting a free webinar on Thursday May 7th at 2pm British Summer Time entitled:

“Making Sense of Android Encryption”

in which we’ll explore Android Full Disk Encryption, the role of Secure start-up, why Android FDE more challenging than it was than in the “good old days” and how it has evolved into File Based Encryption.

Simply follow the link below to register:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6415882356692/WN_6q0-1ts4SIO3RUaNA-qLuw

We hope you can join us!

Join our Cloud Forensics webinar (Thu 23 April 2pm BST)

We were delighted with the interest and attendance of our recent webinar “Android Location Services & Adoptable Storage” (recorded version available), and so we’re running another next week.

We will be hosting a free webinar on Thursday April 23rd at 2pm British Summer Time entitled:

“Cloud Forensics Primer”

in which we’ll explore all things cloud forensics – opportunities, what’s going on behind the scenes during a cloud forensics extraction as well as potential obstacles and pitfalls.

Simply follow the link below to register:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9015858253068/WN_B9WjP-0zT_OCPsVwmu2A2Q

We hope you can join us!