Welcome ITS 452 Computer Forensics CRN 34171

Welcome students to the fall semester. You will find all of this information on the WebCT course. If you do not have your new career account login get to CTIS and get it quick.

The text for this class is:

Nelson, Bill; Phillips, Ameilat & et.al. “Guide to computer forensics and investigation”, Third Edition, Thomson Course Technology, ISBN 10: 1-4180-6733-4

There is also a requirement that you have or purchase at least a 100GB external hard drive, and a 1GB or larger thumb drive. From day 1 you should have these as you will be working with a lot of different things that could be harmful to your machine.

I strongly suggest that you have a virtual machine running Windows XP available. Many of the tools will only run on Windows XP or earlier operating systems. You will have access to the Citrix systems but if you want access after the end of the semester to the tools you will need your own VM. I do not suggest installing them directly on a laptop that you carry anywhere. We could say that the tools would be considered suspect (like stegonography, or file obscuring tools).

You will have an open note, open book, CLOSED neighbor, at home on your time quiz on every chapter of the book. My point being you are going to read the book. They all open on day one and close each week after we talk about that chapter. Work ahead. You will have a pre-paper process we will discuss the first night of classes. You will also have a semester paper and you should be considering what your topic is going to be. One topic per student, and no duplicates of topics in the class.

The final exam is comprehensive and closed book, closed note, and essay.

The meat of the course is the laboratory assignments. You will have to start early and work hard. The laboratory assignments are a variety of technical writing and technical skill demonstrations. Forensics is a demanding field and those demands include the ability to document, discuss, and follow procedures. Further making it through a task regardless of the errors in documentation while capturing any issues is incredibly important.

There is a semester paper and a formal paper process. You will be required to define a topic and research question that you will be working on with the start of the course. You can see the syllabus for further information. There will be a discussion thread started on WebCT about this starting on Monday of the first week of classes. There is one topic per student, one topic per class, no duplication of topics allowed. First come, first served, and it should be an interesting process.

Finally, topical additional readings to the text chapters will be assigned.

If you have any questions post them in the comments here or send me an email through WebCT. If you are not registered on the blog use first initial – last name as a login ID.