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.

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.

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!

Although our classroom might be temporarily closed, we’re working hard to deliver content that our customers and the wider community can access.

We will be hosting a Zoom webinar on Thursday April 9th at 2pm British Summer Time entitled:

“Understanding Android Location Services & Adoptable Storage”

which we hope will allow attendees to examine Android devices safely and more thoroughly.

Simply follow the link below to register:
https://us04web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9015858253068/WN_h710TN66QAO0HPGHbgLbAw

We hope you can join us!

The coronavirus outbreak is affecting people and businesses worldwide. Neither Control-F nor its staff are immune to that (although that would be nice) and we thought it would be helpful to explain how the ever-evolving situation is affecting how we serve our customers.

1. We have postponed some courses which were scheduled for the coming weeks. We hate doing that, but naturally we will follow government advice and can’t help but be affected by travel bans imposed by customer organisations.We will continue to assess the viability of courses scheduled for the coming months and contact booked delegates to keep them informed. To see which courses are affected, please check our Course Schedule page.
2. As you would expect, our staff are working from home and will be using the opportunity to update our existing materials, write new course content and develop our internal infrastructure. Not only that, family pets are receiving more attention, lunchtime runs are being taken and poached eggs have become a feasible lunch option. Every cloud…

Stay safe, stay in touch and we will look forward to resuming our classroom training in the not too distant future.