Simson Garfinkel
Harvard University

Hard drive forensics

February 15, 2006
2:05pm-3:20pm
Room 142, Computer Science Research Bldg.

Abstract:

An amazing amount of confidential data can be found on discarded hard drives. Simson has a collection of over 1,000 hard drives from eBay, from which he has extracted information from deleted files (e.g., pharmacy data, health records, credit cards, legal proceedings). Simson talks about why this data persists, and how to stop the data from persisting.

Biography:

Simson L. Garfinkel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation at Society at Harvard University and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School, where he teaches courses on computer security and application design. He is a consulting scientist at Basis Technology Corp., which develops software for extracting meaningful intelligence from unstructured text, and a founder of Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems.

Dr. Garfinkel has research interests in computer forensics, the emerging field of usability and security, and in personal information management. He is also interested in information policy and terrorism, and has actively published and researched in these areas since the late 1980s.

Garfinkel writes a monthly column for CSO Magazine, for which he was awarded both the 2004 and the 2005 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for Best Regularly Featured Department or Column. He wrote a weekly column for The Boston Globe between 1996 and 2000 and for Technology Review Magazine between 1998 and 2004. He was a founding contributor of Wired Magazine. Overall, Garfinkel's popular articles have appeared in more than 70 publications around the world.

Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing, published by Addison-Wesley, IDG Books, MIT Press, O'Reilly and Associates, and Springer-Verlag. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Garfinkel's most successful book, Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford), has sold more than 250,000 copies in more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991.

Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a master's of science in journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.