Nominations Open for 2014 Forensic 4cast Awards!

Hello all,

As the title of this post states, nominations are now open at the Forensic 4cast website for this years awards. These awards ceremony has become a highly anticipated event each year at the SANS DFIR Summit in Austin, Tx. I'm proud to say I've been nominated twice and won once, winning the 2013 Digital Forensic Blog of the Year.

I've already got some nominations in mind for this year and I plan to submit them soon. As far as blogs go, there are several that can be counted on year after year to provide first-rate content. You can always find excellent content on Corey Harrell's Journey Into Incident Response blog and Harlan Carvey's Windows Incident Response blog. I'm still making up my mind over those and a couple others.

Some candidates I'm considering nominating for Digital Forensic Examiner of the Year include Ken Johnson, Eric Zimmerman and Frank McClain. Ken has done some amazing work on Windows 8 forensic artifacts, while Eric has done excellent work in the area of shellbags artifacts and even released a tool called Shellbags Explorer. Frank is this guy who is always there for people. If you're on any of the DFIR related email lists, you've no doubt seen him there. He is often the first to reply to a request for help and can always be counted on for good advice and suggestions.

Without a doubt, I will be nominating The Art of Memory Forensics for Digital Forensic Book of the Year. I don't remember the last time a forensic book generated as much excitement at the time of its release as this one did. It's a huge book with so much good information. I will be very surprised if this book doesn't take the award. Win or lose, I offer my congratulations to Michael Hale Ligh, Jamie Levy, Andrew Case and AAron Walters on the success of this book.

For the software tool category, I'm looking at such good candidates as Brian Moran's Live Response and Eric Zimmerman's Shellbags Explorer. I'm sure others will come to mind, but these two are definitely in the running.

I do very little in the area of mobile device forensics, so I really don't have any opinions on the Phone Forensics categories. Likewise, I haven't had the opportunity to try out any new hardware, so I really have nothing to add there as well.

I'm still making up my mind on other nominations. If I failed to mention you or your favorites above, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm not considering them as well, so please don't be offended. These are the ones that stand out in my mind at this moment. There are so many good people, blogs and tools out there that it's hard to remember each one as I write this.

I hope you'll take the time to submit your nominations. Thanks again to Lee Whitfield for putting the awards program together each year.