By Camas Frank ~
When Steven Burgess started a shop in the Bay Area repairing floppy disk drives – over three decades ago before you ask – he didn’t think that he’d learn quite so much about human nature.
But after a lot of word of mouth reputation building and a few famous clients with some early edition hard drives, featuring lost data in need of rescue, Burgess set down a path that has him regularly testifying in high profile court cases. For a living and for hire, he follows digital footprints of cheating spouses, tracks down stolen intellectual property and maybe, occasionally, just gets some long lost photos off a flash drive.
“My job is to find the truth,” he says, on more than one occasion during the course of an interview, and while he has fun with the analogy of what he does to a private detective, it’s not that glamorous. He just works with them from time to time.
One thing he knows for certain, “everybody has porn.”
Luckily for the clients who need his help, unless whatever he finds is spectacularly illegal, he’s not the judging type.
Currently based in Santa Maria – but with plans to move into the City of SLO, Burgess Consulting & Forensics is one of the oldest firms in a very specific business. Maintaining deep roots on the Central Coast, he’s got a long-standing relationship with the SLO County Public Defender’s Office, as well as fielding inquires from the cops and DA for some help.
“I never advise people on how to destroy data,” he said, but he gets a lot of those calls.
From a forensic perspective it doesn’t do to tell people how to make his job harder, not to mention the morality of such advise.
“I got a case from the San Luis Obispo Police Department a little while ago. A guy they brought in had managed to take the SD storage card out of his phone, break it, and stick it where the sun don’t shine,” Burgess explained. “I handled that one with tweezers obviously.”
Lest anyone think that tactic works, the data was only damaged out of sheer luck. The perp had managed to break the actual chip inside the plastic, but since the chip is hidden inside layers of durable material, doing that on purpose is quite difficult.
Since 1985 Burgess estimates he’s worked on, “more than 15,000 computers, disk drives, cell phones and mobile devices, and other digital media.”
The fact that he remembers the details of any of the cases is pretty remarkable, but he does enjoy relating the ones that have a lesson attached.
For instance, the case of a teacher at a private high school who was being spied on in her own home by a particularly troublesome classroom creep. Turns out the kid had managed to use “off the shelf” malware tools to hack her email and gain access to her computer microphone and camera.
Through his website – burgessforensics.com – Burgess shares a couple of narratives with a cautionary bent, deviating from the usual clinical analysis of a court report to take a little film noir license.
At a recent meeting of the SLO based industry group Softec’s Tech Brew night, he also prepared some preventative advise for the next phase of the digital millennium, keeping your smartphone safe, and data private.
Oddly enough the best advise is still the oldest, set good passwords, don’t share them, and what ever you do don’t open suspicious attachments in email – that’s how the teacher got hacked.
It might seem like another good line of defense is to never keep anything on a single device that can’t be absorbed as a loss, but just in case you find yourself in need of some emergency recovery or device examination for other reasons, Burgess says it can run $1,000 for a “phone” or $2,000 on a plain old computer.
“Usually, really guilty people don’t hire me,” he said, adding that his small team is there to get to the bottom of the matter. “I just do everything with the idea that litigation could follow. …My whole job is to find out what’s true.”
For a professional evaluation of electronic forensics and discovery call (866) 345-3345 or email: [email protected]