Enron - The Fall of the 7th Largest Corporation in America

December 2, 2001 Enron filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Nothing new here correct, until it became the largest bankruptcy of its kind and known as the largest computer forensic case to date. Watching the video "The Smartest Guys in the Room" was a real eye opener. It is available via Netflix and youtube.com. I watched it via youtube. Only bad part was that there are 10 segments all lasting between 10 to 12 minutes in length. Amazing how some people can think so deviously while others cannot even begin to think at that level.

So, what actually happened? In my opinion, a group of money hungry individuals working together to find more professionals who have little to no ethics to join the corporation to scam billions of dollars from unknowing investors, and the state of California got away with one of the biggest injustices I have seen in my lifetime. It was amazing to watch the whole story unfold and yet to hear about the millions of dollars these men were paid (salary, bonuses and stock options) to defraud so many people.  Arthur Andersen being involved was another shocker. Mark to Market accounting has been around since the early 1990s and Skilling took it to a new level at Enron. No one was allowed to look at their books and discover the huge discrepancies could have stopped the downward spiral of Enron before more than 4000 people lost their jobs and everyone lost their 401K investments and retirement funds. It is difficult to imagine how someone can perform the immoral acts that Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Fastow, Causey and others could and sleep at night. Let alone, sell off their stocks and get millions of dollars and never once think about how they were ruining other people’s lives. I really never gave Enron much thought until it became the Midterm Question for my Computer Forensics class.

I never really put two and two together when California was having those rolling blackouts. Enron was manipulating the markets and the power grid by shutting down electrical power plants to drive up the cost of electricity for the state of California. I never really realized how involved Arthur Andersen was involved until I watched the movie “Smartest Guys in the Room”. Traders involving themselves in insider trading and yet Lay and Skilling stated many times, they knew nothing of what was going on in their corporation. Impossible, it is just a shame; the courts could not recoup more money and assets from the quality and give back to innocent investors. How much influence did Enron have in the fallout of the .com situations way back when?

Forensics - not just dead bodies

Well, we are half way through the semester and the classes are interesting and gearing up to be more intense during the last half. In the Database Modeling class, I have been told that I am getting the materials and my data flow diagrams are shaping up. Next came the Enterprise Data Model followed by the Entity Relationship Diagram. Man this stuff is confusing when you are not a database person. The funny thing about it, is I can program, I can understand relationships between data, I just can't draw the pictures to match "the story". Professor Nocolai always says "Tell me the Story". My favorite part is "The End".

As for Managing for Quality in Production, this Thursday, the class has to present materials on Strategic Planning. We have been separated into five groups of five with I think one exception - one group of six. We have to present on Who is involved with a Strategic Plan. I am going to talk about St. Jude's Children's Hospital since they are a not for profit hospital. This out to be good.

Finally, what we all have been waiting for, the title of my blog today - forensics. I have played around with Encase for the last seven weeks, trying to understand how the software works but with a limited version of the software. I have no idea half the time if what I am doing with open source or free software is netting me the same results as the Encase does since we have to use their sample files. So this week we had due a lab where we had to clone a disk drive and get a hash value. I tried to use WinHex, but that seemed to net me two different hash values, not sure if what I did was correct or not, so I switched to ProDiscover. Only to find out that I had filled my disk drive with images from all the other software that did not work correctly. Spent a lot of time cleaning up and now my system mechanic software is Bitching about all the fragmented files and disk cleanup it needs to do. So, forensics is not only about dead people, I am learning a lot about dead and live imaging and enjoying the hell out of it. I hope there is a part two to this class. I want to learn more.