On the detection of pod slurping attacks

Time is recognised to be a dimension of paramount importance in computer forensics. In this paper, we report on the potential of identifying past pod slurping type of attacks by constructing a synthetic metric based on information contained in filesystem timestamps. More specifically, by inferring the transfer rate of a file from last access timestamps and correlating that to the characteristic transfer rate capabilities of a suspicious USB found in the Windows registry, one could assess the probability of having suffered an unauthorised copy of files. Preliminary findings indicate that file transfer rates can be associated with the make and model of the USB storage device and give supporting information to the forensic analyst to identify file leakages.