Training

This course provides hands-on investigative training at a basic level. Students develop the practical skills, insight, and knowledge necessary to manage a successful financial investigation from start to finish, including the acquisition and examination of financial records, interview skills, and case management and organization. Additional topics include forgery and embezzlement, financial exploitation of the elderly, working with spreadsheets, financial profiling, and state-specific statutes and legal issues.

This course provides students with the fundamental knowledge and skills required to acquire images in a forensically sound manner from Windows-based and macOS-based computers, as well as mobile devices. Presentations and hands-on practical exercises cover topics including the digital forensic process, hardware and software write blockers, forensic image formats, live imaging, and multiple forensic acquisition methods. Students gain hands-on experience with free and commercial third-party imaging tools that are currently used by practitioners in the field.

This course provides expert guidance in the skills law enforcement officers need to conduct successful online investigations. Topics include IP addresses and domains, an overview of currently popular social media platforms, best practices for building an undercover profile, foundational knowledge related to the dark web, and the use of the dark web as an investigative tool. Instructors demonstrate both open source and commercially available investigative tools for social engineering, information gathering, and artifacts related to social media, as well as automated utilities to capture information and crawl websites. 

This course provides the technical and legal information prosecutors need to see cases involving digital evidence through the entire criminal justice process, from seizure and extraction to admissibility to verdict. Topics include digital evidence commonly seized during the execution of a search warrant, digital evidence stored remotely by third-party service providers, and the processes investigators use to obtain this evidence (such as the interrogation of digital devices). There is a strong focus on case law and other legal issues surrounding the collection and custody of digital evidence, as well as its use at trial. The course also examines new legislation like the CLOUD Act, which is reforming the digital evidence landscape just as rapidly as the ever-changing case law.