Loop, peacock’s eye, whorl – these words sound like from a sewing manual, but in fact they denote various shapes of fingerprints that you could hear about at the lecture delivered by Dr Arkadiusz Liber from the Faculty of Computer Science and Management, as part of the Lower Silesian Science Festival.
Dr Arkadiusz Liber is a specialist in computer forensics. He spoke to a group of pupils from high schools, telling them, among other things, that every criminal leaves traces at the scene of the crime, even when they strive to erase them. - He may wear gloves but forget that he has dandruff – and there we are, we have a trace. It is even better if they lose a hair, then we can get to their DNA code – said Liber.
- You may think that if you make a joke and call the police that there is a fire in the school, you will get away with it. But you are wrong. Even if such person calls from a telephone booth, they probably have a mobile phone in their pocket. And it can be spotted very quickly. Moreover, that mobile phone will probably move around for some time, and then stop and lie at one place. This means that the owner is probably sleeping at home, so we can easily identify their address – explained the lecturer.
He also instructed the pupils on electronic traces, which can be also placed at a particular place and time. He talked about saving data on various storage media and data streams in a computer network. - Drowning a hard disk containing illegal data in the bath-tub will not make the criminal safe – said the scientist. He also talked about some curiosities relating to forensics, e.g. that the dactyloscopic brush is made of Marabou stork feathers or that identical twins may have identical fingerprints.
At the end, Liber warned that most of the crimes committed on the Internet are related to the violation of copyrights, which is known as piracy. - Many a time you are not even aware that you break the law because you do not know it – said Liber.
Iwona Szajner, Translation: Dariusz Więcławski
• Lecture entitled “In the world of computer forensics. From fingerprints to electronic traces in mobile devices and Internet clouds”, Wrocław University of Technology, 24 September 2013
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