January 2008 — Features
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
CSI: Hard Drive
Hate groups, terrorist activity, pimping. A day in the life of local law enforcement? No, just a routine sweep of school computers. Digital forensic technology is uncovering the bad, sometimes criminal behavior students and faculty are guilty of.
ACTING ON INFORMATION from students who report seeing a classmate
looking at inappropriate material on a school computer, school officials use
forensics software to plunge the depths of the PC's hard drive, searching for evidence
of improper activity. Images are found in a deleted Internet Explorer cache
as well as deleted file space. Additional evidence collected from log files is joined
with the software-gathered evidence to identify the student who was logged on at
the time the images appeared on the computer. Once the investigation concludes,
the offending student is suspended for three days.
Later, in a suit brought by the student's parents, the district successfully defends its position by showing the use of proven evidence-collecting methods and procedures— and providing a written appropriate use policy that the student is shown to have violated.
So is the story told by Brent Williams, an educational technology specialist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He says there are many more where that came from. "It's happening at school systems everywhere now," Williams says. "The variety [of offenses] is almost endless. If you can think of a technology, someone has figured out a way to abuse it within a school system."
Remember the rumor about Coach Henderson and the cheerleader? Did they or didn't they? Before the advent of the information age, such prurient school gossip never got past the whispering stage. Today, as in the case Williams recounted, such transgressions usually leave a digital trail, where they are dead meat for the investigative powers of computer forensic technology. Forensic software tools can root the truth out of any misappropriated computer, often generating unsettling findings for school administrators when they learn what members of their staff, faculty, and student body have been up to.
Quick Tip
A machine that is being used to steal passwords or attack other computers will speak up. It may reboot randomly, open five websites when the user asks for one, default to a porn page, or allow users to type in only certain keywords.
The worst the kids are usually caught doing are acts of cyberbullying—dissing each other on MySpace or using e-mail to send profanity-laced notes, etc. Posting, in addition to viewing, raunchy photos on MySpace is also a common student offense.
