What is remote data acquistion?

Jan 04, 2024

Having done this work for the better part of twenty years now, it seems strange to hear that question, but I still find myself answering it week after week in sales calls and demos.

Why not take the time now to answer it here and give you an understanding of how I see the market and how I designed F-Response to solve that problem? The best way to start is to explain how it all began. Back in the early 2000s, I was working for a private consultancy and traveling extensively. Simply put, if there was an incident in the continental US, and you hired the firm I worked for, then there were even odds I'd get sent there to help. It was exciting work, but it was also exhausting. One can only acquire so many hotel membership cards and airline miles before one starts to tire of the entire experience.

The problem was, how could I get out of the traveling game without leaving a career I'd built up over so many years?

Well, I didn't know the answer to that question, and for a time was contently frustrated with the lack of knowing what to do next. However, that all came to a head when my daughter was born. Suddenly, I had a competing agenda. I had someone who needed me to be around and not forever sleeping in hotels or waiting for connecting flights.

I wanted to be home, but I also wanted to keep doing what I was good at.

Babies are expensive. Who knew?

So, I did what I could to strike off on my own, to hang my own consulting shingle and try to keep the projects local. As you can imagine, that didn't work. The big cases and opportunities were still wherever I wasn't. What was worse was that while I hated the mundanity of it, even simple forensic disk acquisitions became challenging. How much would it cost for me to get three states away, find the office, the machine, take it apart, and make a forensic image of the hard drive?

I couldn't compete with the big firms doing that.

That's when I got the idea for F-Response. Simply put, I wanted to be able to access the disks or make images of them, over the internet. I wanted to do it in such a way as to be able to use my existing tools and techniques for analysis. I wanted it to be flexible, straightforward, and easy to understand.

I wanted to have my career and my family.

And, as luck would have it, it worked.

F-Response was born. A simple and straight-forward series of products designed to let you connect to remote disks, memory, etc., to analyze their content or create images of them with your favorite tools, to do all of this without leaving the office.

It started as something I used alone, but then I started getting inquiries to open it up to others. I did. I started selling the products and now have made friends and customers across the world. Our tools have been used to collect evidence from far flung places, to avoid airline travel, to work during pandemics, travel shutdowns, across unstable networks and on just about every continent.

So, what is remote data acquisition?

It's a way to collect forensically-sound evidence from remote data sources over networks, local and otherwise. It's a way to solve the travel problem, to get more time with your family, to let you do what you need without spending half your time in the air, in a hotel, or somewhere in between.

That's what remote data acquisition is. It's solving the last mile of computer crime investigation or evidence collection in the most expedient and cost-effective way possible.

That's F-Response.

Warmest Regards,

M Shannon