The breakthrough? A photo of the perpetrator's online girlfriend, featuring a note which reads ' PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w. Less than a month later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested a 30-year-old Linux administrator in Texas, who was later charged with the attack.

In early 2012, CabinCr3w, a notorious hacking group at the time, gained access to computers belonging to Alabama Department of Public Safety, leaked a bunch of confidential data, erased it from their systems, and vandalised several of their websites. Quoted in: Alan Rusbridger 'The Snowden Leaks and the Public' at, November 21, 2013. It's sort of embarrassing how predictable we are as human beings.' Stewart Baker, former General Counsel of the NSA.

' Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life, if you have enough metadata you don't really need content. OK, But How is Metadata Useful in Forensics? Exif data essentially acts as a digital footprint for image files. This metadata is automatically written or ' stamped' on creation of the file, and can often include identifying information, depending on the device it was created with. Image by ianare on GitHub.īut within this file, we have some additional information, such as the File Name, the image Resolution, the Date/Time the image was created, the File Type (Format), and so on. Metadata is often described as ' data about data'.įor instance, in the context of image files, we have the image itself (i.e., the composition of pixels that make up the image), such as the photo below. Put simply, metadata (or meta-information) is 'data that provides information about other data', but not the content of the data itself. In this post, we explore how forensic investigators can use digital photographs and other types of multimedia files to obtain valuable information through metadata (or Exif data) extraction, using readily-available tools such as Exiftool. 10 min read Using Exiftool to Extract Metadata from Image Files.

Free instal ExifTool 12.67