Trey Amick’s Nominations for This Year’s Forensic 4:cast Awards

Since 2009, Lee Whitfield (@lee_whitfield) has held the annual Forensic 4:cast Awards in which the community nominates and votes for outstanding work done in digital forensics from around the industry. It seems every year both individuals and businesses raise the bar for outstanding work.

Submit nominations for the 2020 Forensic 4:cast awards here. Nominations end May 15, 2020, so make sure to nominate your picks before then!

For this year’s awards, I’m nominating the following:

DFIR Social Media Contributor of the Year & DFIR Non-Commercial Tool of the Year

Alexis Birgnoni has truly gone above and beyond with his contributions to the community over the last year. With a Twitter account (@AlexisBrignoni) boasting over 2200 tweets, if you take a moment to scroll through Alexis’ posts it becomes evident very quickly that the community relies both on his research and opinions for their DFIR work.

While he provides exceptional feedback to vendors from across the industry on his thoughts about new features, he has also gone a step further, creating iLEAPP, which leads me to my second recommendation for Alexis: the DFIR Non-Commercial Tool of the Year award.  iLEAPP allows investigators to quickly parse logs, events, and preferences from iOS devices. Utilizing this parser, we can quickly identify wireless cellular service information like the IMEI’s and phone numbers, iOS 11, 12, and 13 notifications, the ever popular KnowledgeC database, and Powerlog artifacts. If you haven’t investigated adding iLEAPP into your forensic toolbox I recommend checking it out over on GitHub. You can also read more about it here. Great job Alexis, and I can’t wait to see what you have in store for the community next!

DFIR Resource of the Year

I’m going to echo Jessica Hyde’s nomination (read more on her nominations here) for this year’s Resource of the Year, which I’m voting for the Digital Forensics Discord Server by Andrew Rathbun ( @bunsofwrath12). Boasting just shy of 3,000 members at the time of this writing, this active community is a fantastic resource for forensicators.

The Digital Forensics Discord has channels ranging from drone, DVR, and network forensics to malware analysis, incident response, and forensic coding. While I always recommend reaching out to vendors directly via support email (such as support@magnetforensics.com), if you encounter problems or having questions, many companies have examiners on the Discord as well, so if questions come up from the community, vendors can respond quickly.

Lastly, I want to thank the community again for both our nomination and for voting for Magnet Forensics in the 2019 Forensic 4:cast awards, helping us win both DFIR Commercial Tool and DFIR Team of the Year.

We value input from the community and build our tools based on that feedback. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out at trey.amick@magnetforensics.com