ACC 427 6-3 Short Paper- Data Research

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1 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research Harriet Creyer 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research Southern New Hampshire University ACC 427 – Investigating with Computers

2 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research Examine the Practical Suspicious Email.txt File A Data analyst tool is a phrase used to describe software and the applications that analysts use in order to “develop and perform analytical processes that help companies to make better, informed business decisions while decreasing costs and increasing profits.” ( Essential Data Analyst Tools discover a list of the 17 best data analysis software & tools on the market ) During your monitoring operations, you find an employee that appears to be emailing a large book, and you decide to give this file further inspection. However, the book appears to be over 48,000 lines of text, and you cannot read each line. For inspecting a large text file containing over 48,000 lines, I would choose an Ultra Edit for the Suspicious Email. It is currently being advertised as “the most flexible, powerful, and secure text editor.” ( UltraEdit text + code editing software 2023). It is also available across multiple platforms inc. Mac and Windows. Regular Expression Search: Find email addresses in the file. Search Query: grep -E -o "..+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,}\b" ( Grep ) file.txt Description: This command uses a regular expression to search for email addresses in the file.txt. The -E option enables extended regular expressions, and the -o option displays only the matching portion of the line. I also tried \b[A-Z0-9._%+-] +@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b ( Grep ) . Both showing no results found.

3 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research Regular Expression Search: Look for Social Security numbers in the file. Search Query: grep -E -o "\b(\+\d{1,3})?[-.\s]?$?\d{3}$?[-.\s]?\d{3}[-.\s]?\d{4}\b" ( Grep ) file.txt Description: This command uses a regular expression to search for phone numbers in various formats in the file.txt. It can handle phone numbers with or without country codes, with or without parentheses, and with different separators. I also tried \b[A-Z0-9._%+-] +@[A-Z0- 9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b ; again, showings no results. I tried to search for specific number for example 0-9 and the only results that were populated were the dates and the chapter numbers throughout the text.

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4 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research Examine the Practical Suspicious Email Bonus.csv File Once again, you are the investigator at the same U.S.-based bank. Your findings from the first monitoring effort have you very concerned, and you have decided to open a case on your subject employee. The next file you have under review is very different from the first, as it contains what appears to be a series of random numbers. Note that the file seems to be very large. To investigate the second file containing random numbers, I would use Code Runner. I chose to use Code Runner as it was compatible with MAC and was a very easy to use tool. It is able to do an entire desktop search for the codes and information you request an input. I would perform regular expression searches to identify patterns, sensitive information, or anomalies within the data. ( CodeRunner 4 ) I would conduct my first search to identify anything that may resemble a social security number (SSN). I found there were 49,138 matches that could potentially be social security numbers The expression I used was \d{9} and \d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4} ( Grep ) just in case this employee tried to ‘hide’ regularly formatted SSNs amongst the vast amount of information; I searched for 9 digits as a ‘standalone’ figure just incase there were any SSNs without any ‘-‘ . Because these numbers could potentially be social security numbers, it raises a red flag and there should be further investigation to compare these numbers with the company’s payroll department to determine if the sender of this document is stealing personally identifiable information from his employer that can be sold on the dark web. (Goyvaerts) My concern would be that whoever obtained the information could potentially know who any SSN’s were hidden within these figures for example adding a 0/1 at the start of an

5 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research SSN and/or an 8/9 at the end. This would create more numbers than what would be searched for but also ‘hide’ the SSN. Another Regular expression that I did was to search for credit card numbers using regular expressions (e.g., \d{4}-\d{4}-\d{4}-\d{4}) and \b\d{13,16}\b ( Grep ) ; this would allow for a search for any numbers that are laid out in the format of a credit card number with a 4-4-4-4 but also any specific numbers that are between 13-16 digits, for example an American express card has less digits than a standard credit card. Both of these regular expressions found no results within this information. (Goyvaerts) However, a search for bank account numbers or routing numbers using regular expressions could potentially run into the same problems found when searching for SSN’s. It could potentially be ‘hidden’ within numbers and only the person who formatted this information would know.

6 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research Summary The information within the first email didn’t turn up any significant numerical information, however, that is not to say that the recipient of this email and the sender have some sort of code to break down the information. After reviewing this data, it has raised some rather large red flags concerning how this information has been stored. The employee emailing just this information is extremely concerning and is clearly hiding something within

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7 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research the information to which they and the recipient may be the only ones to be able to read this information. I think it is difficult to fully interpret this information without having the ‘code’ if there is one. Within the large data files data can be easily manipulated as mentioned and it could possibly only be ‘translated’ by the sender.

8 6-3 Short Paper: Data Research References CodeRunner 4 . CodeRunner. (n.d.). https://coderunnerapp.com/ Command line compare of files and folders with DOS command prompt . UltraEdit. (2022, December 20). https://www.ultraedit.com/support/tutorials-power-tips/ultracompare/ command-line/ Essential Data Analyst Tools discover a list of the 17 best data analysis software & tools on the market . Top 17 Data Analytics Tools - Best Software for Data Analysts. (n.d.). https://www.datapine.com/articles/data-analyst-tools-software Goyvaerts, J. (n.d.-a). Finding or verifying credit card numbers. https://www.regular- expressions.info/creditcard.html Goyvaerts, J. (n.d.-b). Specialized tools and utilities for working with regular expressions . Popular Tools, Utilities and Programming Languages That Support Regular Expressions. https://www.regular-expressions.info/tools.html Grep . GNU Grep 3.11. (n.d.). https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html#Command_002dline-Options GREP(1) - linux manual page. (n.d.). https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/grep.1.html UltraEdit text + code editing software . UltraEdit. (2023, April 25). https://www.ultraedit.com/products/ultraedit/