In the digital age, criminal actions are not limited to the physical world anymore. Forensic investigators keep pace and today examine footprints, DNA and traces of cyber-crime alike. The University of Münster now hosts an international conference that sheds light on recent developments in the quickly evolving field of "IT forensics".

 

Prof. Dr. Rainer Böhme, assistant professor at the Department of Information Systems and  expert in multimedia forensics, is the general chair of this year's "International Conference on IT Security Incident Management & IT Forensics" (IMF). Now in its eighth edition, the conference invites experts from industry, academia, law enforcement, and other government bodies for the first time to Münster to discuss new directions in IT security and forensic research and development. The conference, which takes place May 12–14, 2014, is held under the auspices of the German Informatics Society (GI e.V.), in cooperation with the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). 

 

"Each about one third of the attendees will be from law enforcement, industry, and academia", says Rainer Böhme about the up to 100 participants. "Many of them also have a background in privacy and data protection", he adds. 

 

One of the main applications of IT forensics is the investigation of cyber-crime and cyber-fraud cases. Rainer Böhme mentions the recovery of deleted information in volatile memory as a typical example. Time-stamping unknown audio recordings based on background noise is another topic that will be discussed at the conference. 

 

Apart from technical methods, the participants will also address economic perspectives of IT forensics, often subsumed under the term "IT Security Incident Management": cooperations and public bodies need to strategize more and more how to prepare for security incidents, like the recently discovered "heartbleed" vulnerability, and how to react professionally in case an incident has happened. 

 

The keynote of the three-day event will be given by one of the most well-known international experts in digital forensics, the US-based researcher and IT security consultant Eoghan Casey.