ComputerForensicsDigest.com

Modifications, or "mods," are a popular technique in the gaming community for altering or extending the capabilities of video game software and hardware. Under the best of circumstances, mods have a questionable legality. It turns out, however, that some mods are downright criminal.

Law enforcement officials have discovered that some individuals -- frequently those engaged in the production, distribution, and collection of child pornography -- have developed techniques to modify the hard drives of original Xbox 360s to hide electronic data. The Xbox uses a proprietary FATX file system to store information, making it more difficult for law enforcement to identify and examine stored data.

David Collins, a computer forensics expert at Sam Houston State University, has developed a new toolkit called XFT that allows forensic examiners to easily examine the directory structure and files on an Xbox hard drive. The software also allows the examiner to record his or her activities to provide documentation of the investigation.

Collins is planning to expand XFT into a full-blown forensic OS that can either be booted from a hard drive or a "live" bootable CD.