by Alain Filotto | May 10, 2023 | Cybersecurity, Forensics, General Topic
My name is Fox, Alex Fox
First, I need to state what’s obvious to me but maybe not to everyone. My company name is simply my initials, AF, in the military or phonetic alphabet. You know… alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, fox…
It all originated when I started working for the RCMP. I worked with this guy named Dave Fox (Hi Dave!) and I thought he had the coolest last name LOL. And back in high school I had a friend who used to call me Alex for reasons that I can’t quite remember. But I liked the name. So I ended up merging the two and used the name Alex Fox as a sort of pseudonym. Back in the day, when there were telephone books, most police officers did not want to be listed. You had to pay to be unlisted but there was a little trick. You could be listed under any name. So I was listed in the phone book as Alex Fox for a long time.
Alphafox Digital Forensic Services Limited
This was my first company name. When I left the RCMP I wanted to do a lot of work with police still. So I wanted to be recognizable. The RCMP forensic unit is called DFS, digital forensic services. So I thought it would be neat to call my company ADFS. What I found out though, is that the name was too long, it would not even fit on a credit card! Long story short, I renamed the company Alphafox Forensics Limited. Nice, short and clear.
The fox is now my spirit animal!
I never really thought of the Fox as my spirit animal, but it found me rather than I found it. Sometimes we see things that were always there in a different light. Or maybe we just become more aware of them. I see foxes everywhere now! Interestingly, it reminds me of a sad story. Many years ago, a young girl named Mindy Tran was kidnapped. The suspect was driving a white van. I was working that day and I remember that after hearing that, I started seeing white vans everywhere! I never saw so many of them. Again, we become much more aware of our environment when we are focused.
So where have I seen foxes? Well for starters, it made me remember that my favourite story is “Le Petit Prince”, (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. If you haven’t read the book, do yourself a favour and read it for yourself and/or your kids. It’s a great story with deep meaning. At one point, when he lands on earth, The Little Prince meets a fox. The fox teaches him about friendship, love, and loss. Foxes are so smart!
I like computer and Playstation games. Recently, I played this great Japanese Samurai game called The Ghost of Tsushima. In the game you have to find these foxes that lead you to shrines that give you extra power. The fox has a great significance in Japanese culture. They are called Kitsune and are spiritual beings that can shape-shift into either male or female forms and possess superior intelligence.
Starbucks even had a cookie in the shape of a fox recently!
Finally the Canadian Mint created a special coin with a silver fox on it. Normally the Canadian $1 coin has a loonie. It was a special edition coin so of course I bought it!
Always happy to answer questions or if want to book a free consultation, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto
by Alain Filotto | Mar 29, 2023 | Cybersecurity, Forensics, General Topic
I was a guest on “The Protectors” Podcast recently
The episode is out now! Brought to you by the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators https://www.iafci.org/ Great conversation with Mark Solomon and Mike Carroll. Thank you
https://protectorspodcast.com/episode/dont-get-held-hostage-by-ransomware-sextortion-and-online-scams/
If you have any questions or want to book a free consultation, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto
by Alain Filotto | Jan 21, 2023 | General Topic
After 29 years of police work this feels “right”
When you contact ALPHAFOX Forensics Ltd. for a workplace investigation, you are getting a one-stop shop. The best digital forensics and employee investigations. I’m am trained in interviewing techniques and statement analysis.
What can a private investigator do?
Private investigators in are licensed professionals who are authorized to conduct investigations on behalf of their clients. The following are some of the tasks that a private investigator can do:
- Serve legal documents on behalf of clients, such as subpoenas, summons, and other legal notices.
- Conduct corporate investigations including corporate fraud, embezzlement, or other illegal activities within a business organization.
- Conduct background checks on individuals to gather information about their criminal history, employment history, financial history, and other relevant information.
- Investigate insurance claims to verify the validity of the claim and to gather evidence to support or refute the claim.
- Locate missing persons, including lost relatives, runaway children, and individuals who have disappeared under suspicious circumstances.
- Conduct surveillance to gather information about a subject’s activities, behaviour, and movements.
If you have any questions or want to book a free consultation, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto
by Alain Filotto | Jan 19, 2023 | Cybersecurity, Forensics, General Topic
It’s time to book your FREE digital evidence presentation with me
Take advantage of my 15+ years working in this field including 10 years as an examiner with the RCMP. I can only book a very limited number of presentations every month so don’t wait. Contact me to schedule a very informative presentation on digital forensics and how it can help your case.
The image above is from my last in-person presentation in Ukraine. What great memories! I presented on investigative techniques and digital technologies to the Ukrainian National Police. I’ve presented internationally, nationally and at the local level. I’ve presented to police and lawyers alike including the BC Prosecution Service, the Department of Justice, and the association of French Jurists. Lastly, I was an instructor on several police courses including the Major Crime Investigation course, the Sexual Assault course and the Internet for Investigators course.
I’m very excited about this and going “on the road”! I can also present remotely if your firm is outside the Vancouver area.
If you have any questions or want to book a presentation, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto
by Alain Filotto | Jan 8, 2023 | Forensics, General Topic
What exactly is an email and how does it travel through the Internet?
I’ve testified about this numerous times, and I am sharing here how I explain it when I testify in court. When providing testimony to judges, juries and even lawyers, they want to have non-technical explanations that use plain language. I like to think that I am pretty good at that, and especially coming up with good simple analogies that everyone is familiar with. First you have to look at what an email is with its basic definition. “Email” stands for “electronic mail”, so it helps to compare it to regular mail using the good old fashion postal service. Let’s dig in on the journey of an email! (I’ve also included at the end how text messages travel from user A to user B in a similar manner).
Let’s compare an email to regular mail
First, there is a message which you place in an envelope. Second, there is a sender name and address and a recipient name and address. Let’s call them Bob and Tim. Bob wants to send a letter to Tim. He writes a message and places it in an envelope with his address as the sender and Tim’s address as the recipient. He drops the envelope in a mailbox. Now, does the envelope go directly to Tim’s address? No, it does not. The envelope has to go through the Postal Service which will redirect the envelope. For email, your Email Service Provider is like the post office. When Bob sends a letter to Tim, it first goes to the post office who sorts it, and then sends it to Tim. If Tim is in a different country, the post office in Bob’s country would send it to the post office in Tim’s country. Then, in the other country, they will send it to Tim’s address. Simple enough, yes?
The journey of an email
When you’re writing an email you type your message, pick a receiver and subject. The message is placed in a container by your email program which is similar to an envelope. Let’s assume that Bob has a Gmail account and Tim has a Hotmail account. The email service is like a post office and different services is kind of like being in different countries. Bob writes an email message from his Gmail account and sends it to Tim’s Hotmail account. The email does not go directly to Tim, just like a letter does not go directly to an individual. It must travel through “servers” which are like post offices. People sometimes don’t want to admit they do not know what a server is and are afraid to ask. A server is simply a computer somewhere. Therefore, a Gmail server is a computer that Google owns, and a Hotmail server is a computer that Microsoft owns. Still with me? Good.
When Bob sends an email, it first goes to a Gmail server because he has a Gmail account. When the Gmail server receives the email, it puts some information on it called a “header”. An email can have multiple entries in the header if it travels through multiple servers. This is like the ink stamp that the post office places on the envelope and over the stamp. Some of you may have never mailed an actual letter but trust me on this! LOL. When the Gmail server receives the email message for Tim, it says “oh, this needs to go to Hotmail”. The Gmail server then sends Bob’s email to a Hotmail server. When the Hotmail server receives the email, it looks at the address, adds information to the header, and then sends it to Tim’s email account. Voilà!
Actually, that’s not quite how it ends
The Hotmail server will hold the email until Tim fetches it. In fact, the sever will keep a copy until the email is deleted. This is one difference with paper letters. The post office does not, or should not, keep a copy of your letters. There are times when it does happen. When I was with the drug section, we intercepted packages all the time. But that’s another story. Email servers do keep copies of emails and this allows users to see or “download” their emails from multiple devices.
What about mobile text messages?
Mobile text messages are very similar except that your “post office” is your telephone’s cellular data provider. In Canada we have Telus, as an example, and in the US, they have Verizon. When Bob sends a text message to Tim and Bob is with Telus and Tim is with Verizon, they are using their cellular data to send messages back and forth. Again, the messages do not go straight to the other user. First, Bob’s message goes to a Telus server which is just a computer owned by Telus. Telus receives the text message and sees that the recipient is a Verizon phone number. Therefore Telus sends the message to a Verizon server. When Verizon receives it, it sees that the phone number is Tim’s account and sends the message to Tim’s mobile device.
What about WiFi messages and Apple iMessage?
Text messages are a little bit different than email because mobile devices can use cellular services or WiFi. The way I described WiFi messages and Apple iMessages is by using a courier analogy. By courier, I mean services like Purolator, UPS, or FedEx. Apple for instance has a service called iMessage. This service only works with other apple devices. You cannot send an iMessage from an iPhone to an Android phone for example. Basically the same service provider (Apple) receives and delivers the message. So if both Bob and Tim have iPhones, they can send each other iMessages only on WiFi and do not even need a cellular data provider. They in effect, “bypasses” the good old fashioned post office. Just like a Courier service receives and delivers a package, Apple handles all of the message transmission.
Conclusion
Using real-world and “common” analogies, like the post office and courier service, is very helpful in explaining technology to lay-persons. It avoids the use of technical terms and keeps things as simple as possible. It can be used to explain many other things. For example, email spoofing is when an attacker uses someone’s email address to send a malicious messages. This is like changing the sender email address on the envelope. Therefore never trust the contents inside the envelope. Just because you recognize the sender address does not meant they actually sent it!
If you have any questions, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto
by Alain Filotto | May 1, 2022 | Cybersecurity, General Topic
What are the dangers facing children online?
I’ve wanted to write about this for a while as it is a subject that is important to me. A good chunk of my police experience was working to protect children online and investigating sexual exploitation offences. The RCMP has a great unit working on this, the Internet Child Exploitation team (ICE). I worked with them as an investigator and later supported them as a digital forensic examiner. I have done a lot of public talks on the subject and I want to share what I have learned here. So what are the dangers? There’s basically 4 different dangers or threats children will face online.
- The threat from sexual predators, also known as child luring
- The threat of sexual exploitation, also known as child pornography
- The threat from “regular” pornography
- Everything else
The threat from sexual predators or child luring
This is the one every parent fears, that their child will meet someone online and get kidnapped. It’s a real danger and it does happen, but not as often as people think. That being said, according to the website protectchildren.ca the numbers have been increasing in the last few years. As we will see in the next section, the biggest dangers unfortunately are from people that your child already knows. Yes, that includes family members.
Mr. Creepy
But there is no denying that there are a lot of weird people out there. Or as my friend Dana Mantilia likes to call them, Mr. Creepy. The truth is that there are people that are sexually attracted to children. About 2-5% of the population and overwhelmingly men. I want to say 99% but that is not scientific. What is scary is the fact that since 2 to 5 people out of 100 are “creepy” then that means that… you probably know one!
What is child luring
In Canada child luring is defined in the Criminal Code under section 172.1. When I make presentations on internet safety I point out that the most likely victims of this are girls. Boys too but to a lesser degree. Sexual orientation plays a part in this as the majority of offenders are males. There is a ton of material on the subject of protecting kids online. I don’t need to repeat lists here but I will point out what I think are the most important.
What’s that app?
First, just be aware of what your kids are doing. No need to check all their contacts or micro-manage them. Just know which apps they use and have “some” familiarity on what they do. Some years ago the chat app “kik” was infiltrated by predators. The way the app functioned and was designed made this easier than with other apps. There is still news about it online. So just do some research and be aware of what your kids are doing.
It’s all about the passwords
The second thing I recommend is that you need to know your child’s passwords and passcodes. Yes all of them. They will say “you don’t trust me”! You can simply answer, “yes, I trust you. I just don’t trust everyone else”.
Kids understand more than you think
I like to point out to parents that they would never allow their kids to go to a sleepover at someone’s house unless they knew who it was and where it was. Would you? I don’t think so. Kids understand and accept rules when we explain the rules to them. The other benefits is that if your kid goes missing, or runs away, you will have something to help the police investigate.
The threat of sexual exploitation
This is the threat children face about having images or videos of them posted online. Yes I am talking about sexual images or videos. It could be from sexual abuse, which would be the worst kind. But it could also be from what is called “self-exploitation“. It could also happen if someone was to share intimate images or videos with a partner and then that partner would share the images and videos with others. This could happen with or without the originator’s consent, but most likely without.
Use the resources online
The Government of Canada has a webpage here with some additional information and definitions. Cybertip.ca is Canada’s national tip line for reporting abuse. You can report by clicking here. The sexual abuse of children is a large topic and I want to stay focused on internet safety. The sad truth though, is that 90% of child victims knew the offender, and in 30% of the cases, it was a family member.
Sexting gone wrong
Unfortunately, incidents of “sexting” gone wrong happens too often in today’s schools. One thing that kids need to know is that it is illegal to send sexual pictures of persons under the age of 18 (themselves included). It could be “distributing child pornography”. It is not an offence if the image(s) are only shared between two persons involved in a relationship and the the age difference is 5 years or less. Even if your children are not involved, they may “know” about it. Encourage them to report it to the school or tell them that you will report it and ask the school to keep your child’s identity anonymous.
The threat from “regular” pornography
Parents are usually surprised when I tell them that the biggest threat to their boys is online pornography and not the threat of kidnapping. Everyone know there is a lot of pornography on the internet but they don’t necessarily think it’s “that bad”, or that it is just a “boy thing”. When I was a kid, cough cough, it was very hard to find ANY pornography. You would be lucky if your friend found his dad’s stash and was able to do a show-and-tell. These days it is way to easy to find and not just naked images, hardcore videos too. There is some research that has shown that this is having a negative effect on young boys and worse, it will have a lifetime effect.
The negative effects
You can read an interesting article here about the negative effects of porn on boys (and girls). I mean most people reading this probably think kissing should happen BEFORE oral sex right? There is a lot of information online about this, including 8 negative effects of porn on young boys. One of the most serious effect is the possibility of developing a pornography addiction. Most people are unaware of this and many probably think it is not possible. This is a growing problem that can follow them into adulthood.
Everything else
Kids are humans and just like adults, they are at risk from everything else, scams, frauds, phishing attacks etc. The most important thing here is to be “cyber aware” as a parent ourselves. And then to share this knowledge with our kids and have discussions about it. My first goal is always to help people. Be safe out there and keep an eye on your kids!
If you have any questions, contact me on LinkedIn. It is the best place to reach me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alain-filotto
