Jim Christy will discuss the history and future of using Digital Forensics to solve almost any investigation, including his role leading Cyber Ops for the D.B. Cooper Cold Case Team.
In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper (Press misidentified him as D.B. Cooper and that name has stuck) hijacked a Northwest Orient flight showing a flight attendant a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded and received $200,000 cash and 4 parachutes. After releasing the passengers, he directed the flight crew to fly him to Mexico with a refueling stop in Reno, NV. Somewhere over Washington State, it is believed D.B. Cooper parachuted out of the airliner via the rear stairway with the ransom, never to be heard from again. For law enforcement, this is the only unsolved skyjacking in American history.
Christy put together an online task force to help Colbert’s team prove the real identity of DB Cooper, starting with the evidence from Colbert’s 2016 documentary and continuing through a surprising number of online sources and contacts for a 45-year-old case. It only took them a few years to prove what had eluded countless investigators in all that time. Learn all about the techniques that brought them success and join Jim Christy after the Keynote for an extended Q&A session and meet & greet in our Underground track!
Special Agent Jim Christy (Retired) is President and CEO of The Christy Group LLC, Vice President of Investigations and Digital Forensics at Cymmetria, and President and Co-Founder of the Digital Forensics Consortium. Before leaving government service in 2013, he was the Director of Futures Exploration (FX) for the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3). Christy had many earlier cyber security roles, including Director of the Defense Cyber Crime Institute from 2003–2006, and Director of Operations of the Defense Computer Forensics Laboratory from 2001-2003. He has received numerous awards, moderated DEF CON’s “Meet the Fed” panel for 12 years, and had his early work on the Hanover Hacker case featured in “The Cuckoo’s Egg.”