US researchers have developed a forensics toolkit for the XBox gaming console that could let law enforcement agencies find any and all hidden materials easily stored on the console’s hard disk.

Computer scientist David Collins of Sam Houston State University spends many a happy day messing around with the Microsoft XBox purely in the name of science. He has now developed a digital toolkit that can extract an image of the Xbox’s FATX file system and all the contents of the drive and mount it on a separate PC for independent criminal investigation.

“Once the XBox file system is mounted, the analyst can use shell commands to browse the directory tree, open files, view files in hex editor mode, list the contents of the current directory in short or long mode and expand the current directory to list all associated subdirectories and files,” explains Collins.

So, if you’re a cyber criminal and you thought you were safe from the law in hiding your illicit files in the arcane and ill-documented FATX system, think again. Collins is on the case.

David Collins (2009). XFT: a forensic toolkit for the original Xbox game console Int. J. Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2 (2), 199-205