The complete NITRO course includes an instructor's guide, two student coursebooks, a network configuration guide, as well as more than 1300 presentation slides.
Public Intelligence
Today, we release the complete U.S. Secret Service Network Intrusion Responder Program Course (NITRO), including an instructional guide and network administration guidelines for complete reproduction and dissemination. The package comprises more than 2,000 pages of instructional materials including graphical slides and step-by-step guides which form a complete introduction to law enforcement capabilities and methods in the field of computer forensics, including many different forms of evidence extraction.
The entire course, including other materials related to computer forensics, was discovered on a publicly accessible server at http://www.intelizone.com/ a domain which consists of nothing but a directory listing and is registered to Morrison Andrews Consulting in Monroeville, PA. According to an official brochure issued by the U.S. Secret Service, the NITRO course is a “fourteen day course . . . designed to provide training on how to effectively respond to a network incident including mitigation of the problem, collecting volatile data, and fully investigating a network based crime”. The course is offered by the Secret Service’s National Computer Forensics Institute which is located in Hoover, Alabama. In recent testimony to the Senate Homeland Security, Mr. Michael P. Merritt, Assistant Director of the Office of Investigations at the U. S. Secret Service, stated that:
The National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI) initiative is the result of a partnership between the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the State of Alabama. The goal of this facility is to provide a national standard of training for a variety of electronic crimes investigations. The program offers state and local law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges the training necessary to conduct computer forensics examinations.
Investigators are trained to respond to network intrusion incidents and conduct basic electronic crimes investigations.
Since opening on May 19, 2008, the Secret Service has provided critical training to 564 state and local law enforcement officials representing over 300 agencies from 49 states and two U.S. territories.
The complete package of the course allows for its full implementation by anyone desiring to inform their organization of current techniques regarding computer forensics, as well as cybercrime and law enforcement methods for investigating potential offenses. These materials are made available in an effort to advance public understanding of cybercrime, as well as the privacy concerns inherent in the use of forensic methods for extracting digital evidence.