Indeed, if one looks back on some of the major computer crimes in which suspects were caught, one will notice that rarely was it the digital evidence that led to their capture. In the case of Jeffrey Goodin of California, the first ever under the Can-Spam Act, it was a recorded phone call with a friend who had flipped on the suspect that led to the conviction. In the case of the Russian botnet operators who had extorted millions from gaming sites, it was an undercover operation in which a “white hat” hacker befriended the criminals. In the United Kingdom, says Grugq, the police are using social modeling to try to penetrate antiforensics used on mobile phones for drug dealing. “The police’s goal is to get a confession,” he says. “They don’t care if they have compelling evidence off the disk.” In the TJX case, the only arrests made to date are based on purchases of exorbitant gift cards at the company’s retail stores, caught on tape.

It will be the interviews with those people, and not system analysis, that will lead to more information and, potentially, more arrests in the case.

“Every successful forensics case I’ve worked on turned into a physical security investigation,” says Bill Pennington, a researcher at White Hat Security and veteran technical forensics investigator. “In one case, it was an interview with someone who turned on someone else. You layer the evidence. Build it up. He sees the writing on the wall, and he cracks. But if we had to rely on what the computer evidence told us, we would have been stuck.”

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