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Camarillo company teams with another to go after wrongdoing
Nov 01, 2009 (Ventura County Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
As the way people use technology changes, so does the way technology is used to catch wrongdoing.
Verdict Resources Inc. in Camarillo has teamed with a partner to expand its investigative services to cell phone forensics, an increasingly important field as people communicate via mobile text messages, e-mails, photos and videos.
The company works a lot with law firms, corporations and government agencies.
Verdict Resources, which has operated in Camarillo since 1996, has joined with Mobile Phone Investigations Inc. in Santa Maria to capitalize on their respective strengths. Verdict Resources can now offer its clients cell phone forensics, while Mobile Phone Investigations can pass on computers for analysis -- a specialty of Verdict Resources principal John Troxel.
Kevin Martin recently started Mobile Phone Investigations after years of instructing in the field and 16 years in law enforcement. He saw the potential for examining mobile phones during a homicide case about five years ago.
"I saw at that time where this technology was going to go and how popular it was going to become," he said, with the potential for helping solve criminal and civil cases.
With mobile phones, there are constantly new models and new operating systems hitting the market, so it made sense for Verdict Resources to work with someone who knows the discipline, Troxel said.
For Martin, the skills and tools unique to each business complement each other, as does the ability to examine data on mobile devices and hard drives.
The work already has paid off. Troxel said the most common use of analysis is in an employment situation, since you -- or in this instance an employer -- must own a device to have it analyzed.
In a recent case, a salesman for a local company was using company data inappropriately -- he was planning to leave the company and take proprietary information with a list of clients, Troxel said.
Text messages and contact names were on the cell phone, which were used to guide the search of his computer's hard drive.
"He was more careful on the computer -- people are more aware of what's on their computer, what they should say and shouldn't say," Troxel said. "They're a lot more casual on their cell phones still."
The information on the cell phone can narrow the search of the computer, which, with increasingly larger hard drives, takes more time and effort.
"People are doing a lot more on computers today and saving more than they used to," Troxel said.
Grabbing data from a cell phone also can be used to help the user. That's what happened in a recent sexual harassment case where one employee was sending inappropriate video messages to another employee's phone. Troxel said they were able to grab the data from the phone of the person who received the messages and trace them back to the source.
Companies that do investigations have to modify their tactics as people become more savvy about covering their tracks and using new technology -- such as anti-forensics programs used to wipe a file from a computer's system.
"People are starting to do that; they are trying to cover their tracks more and not get found out," Troxel said.
He mentioned a case in Los Angeles where an employee knew how to get rid of his tracks online, which meant Troxel's job took a bit longer.
In that case, someone had created an e-mail address on Yahoo and used it to send out risque images of an employee to everyone in the company. The e-mail address used a derivation of that employee's name, so it would look like it came from the employee.
"They hired me to come in and figure out what happened -- to see if they had an internal issue," Troxel said.
Verdict Resources started by looking at the header information in the e-mail, which showed that it had originated within the company. Then they looked on the network to see who was on Yahoo that afternoon, coming up with four people.
They grabbed the hard drives of each and started on the most likely suspect.
"This person did a good job," Troxel said. "There was nothing about Yahoo in the history, no image in the computer. They did a pretty good job covering their tracks."
But when Troxel did an analysis with his computer, some old HTML files showed someone had gone into Yahoo and created the account that had been used to send out the e-mail. Though it didn't show that person had sent the e-mail, it provided evidence that suggested he had created the e-mail account right there in the office.
He was fired.
Troxel said there has been an increasing demand for the services provided by Verdict Resources, which has helped the company perform well in this poor economy. The company has seen an increase in revenue each year, he said.
Verdict Resources has just three people on staff, but, as with Mobile Phone Investigations, it seeks partnerships with other experts so it can offer customers a wide range of services.
"The key for us has not been to grow our company by hiring employees, but we have hired guns -- people that are experts -- that we use quite a bit," Troxel said.
On the Net: http://www.verdict.net
To see more of the Ventura County Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.venturacountystar.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Ventura County Star,
Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints,
email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send
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