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      <image:title>Bloomberg - Build it.</image:title>
      <image:caption>Select your entire table, go to the Data ribbon and press Stocks. This will convert the currency codes into a data source. If there is now a building icon next to each currency pair, it has worked. Okay this is the really cool part. Press any cell in the table. A small square box with a plus sign should appear on the top right of the table. When you click this little button, you will get options such as 52 week high, change and more. All we need is Price and Change %. Once you've added these, your table should now look like this. You'll notice the cells in the Price column have various currency symbols and the Change (%) column cells are expressed as %. We don't need either in this format so simply select both columns, go to the Home ribbon and press Number Format &gt; General. All currency symbols and % signs should now be removed.So we now have a table with all the key data. Brilliant. Simply by pressing Refresh All in the Data ribbon, all this data will update to the latest information. You could stop here to be honest, you can now pull live currency data (it is slightly delayed) into a spreadsheet easily. But if you want to build the mighty and powerful FXC (I'm trying to make this topic less dry), please proceed. Step 2. The Main Grid (FXC) Create a new sheet in Excel. This is where the FXC itself will be displayed. Write out all the currency codes in a grid like this Let's start with filling it out from the left. Select the cell I have above (USD/SEK or C6 to be precise) and reference the cell in your data sheet from Step 1, which in this case is the USD/SEK price cell. Your formula should look something like this and I've put an English translation next to it =Sheet1!C3 In English: Show the contents of this particular cell in another cell Now just pull this cell down (so the one below that =Sheet1!C4, below that =Sheet1!C5 etc). Remember USD/USD should be empty and to apply the same rule for all other currencies. Now fill out the rest of the grid (EUR/SEK for me was =Sheet1!C13 and JPY/SEK =Sheet1!C23, it should follow a similar pattern your end). Your completed grid should look like this You now have a functioning FX matrix, great. If you're happy with this, just skip to step 4 to match the FXC design. However, if you want each currency price to change colour if it has appreciated/depreciated day on day (quite useful), move onto Step 3. This is the most complex part, but it's not as challenging as pricing interest rate swaps. Step 3. Percentage Change Highlighting Copy the grid you created in Step 2, to your other sheet with the data table. I had a box pop up warning me "There are one or more circular references..." just press okay, we will fix this. The new grid we have copied, will reference the Change (%) column in our data table. So starting from the left again, the formula for USD/SEK should read something like this if you have replicated my screenshots so far. Sheet1!=D3 This should display the percentage change of the specific currency pair. Fill out this new grid (should follow similar rules to your last grid e.g. EUR/SEK =Sheet1!D13, JPY/SEK =Sheet1!D23 etc), your completed grid should look like this So this grid shows the percentage change day on day for each currency pair. We will now get it to feed into our FXC. Let's start by creating some percentage change bands. On your data sheet, create the following (see cells G16-G22 below, putting it in the same place is highly advisable for the next part). Now go back to your sheet with the FXC on (the one we built in Step 2). It's time for conditional formatting, he says with dread. Select all the cells in your grid, go to the Home Ribbon and press Conditional Formatting &gt; New Rule. Select Classic as the style and choose the option which allows you to "Use a formula to determine which cells to format." Let's start with the easy one. If a currency pair has appreciated by greater than 2.5%, turn the cell bright green (if you're familiar with the Bloomberg Terminal this hopefully makes sense). The formula should look something like this: Home</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic - Linux based Data Recovery, &amp; Forensic Investigation.</image:title>
      <image:caption>Recovering data is not something any IT-pro wants to face. But when the occasion arises, you may be glad Linux is around to give a helping hand.</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic - Data recovery: The process of salvaging data from a computer when the device housing the data is inaccessible.</image:title>
      <image:caption>It is something no IT pro ever wants to have to deal with, especially within a data centre. Why? Because data recovery could mean data loss, and the implications surrounding data loss are many: Lost revenue Hacked, Forensic or Anti-forensic events, ransomware, or significant cybersecurity events, have compromised: data, apps, or software Lost documentation Lost contacts Lost proprietary information Lost client information Lost time Lost confidence The list goes on. In the end, when something goes wrong with a system (viruses, failing hardware, ransomware, hacked, corrupt or broken operating system, etc.), it is on you to recover the precious data saved to that local drive. This could be on a desktop or a server, an end-users machine, smartphone, or the systems housing your company database/web/cloud. During our routine work as professional IT Expert Witnesses, or software forensic Expert Witnesses, it often provides a useful toolset.</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic - Recovering Data or Computer assets.</image:title>
      <image:caption>The truth of the matter is, it is not a matter of "if," but "when" you're going to wind up having to recover data. Although the cloud has made this a bit less daunting (with the ability to sync your data to cloud servers using little effort), you cannot always count on the cloud and, in some cases, you might have data you don't want hosted on a third-party server. So when you are tasked with recovering data, where do you turn? For many, the answer is Linux or a Unix-based system. But how can one operating system make the recovery of data from another even possible? You might be surprised at just how easily this can be done. So long as a hard drive hasn't catastrophically failed (at which point you would be either sending that data off to a forensics specialist or accepting defeat), you can recover that data without too much hassle. Let me explain one straightforward process. ~ Welcome to Linux Live distribution</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic - Linux Live.</image:title>
      <image:caption>One area where Linux has shined for years is the ability to test out a Linux distribution before it is installed. This is done by way of what is called a Live distribution. How this works is simple: When you boot up a Live distribution (most modern Linux operating systems have that option) you'll see something akin to what Ubuntu offers (Figure A - on the right). By clicking Try Ubuntu, you launch a live instance of the operating system. What does this mean? A live instance runs completely in the IT system's RAM (computer memory), so nothing is changed on the hard drive of the machine. In other words, if that machine has Windows installed on the local drive, Windows will still be “there”, but not running.  [Note, if for Forensic purposes you need to capture the RAM then you need specific approaches and software, and this must be done immediately you turn the power on, or physically take the RAM out of the computer and Forensically examine ‘offline’.] This is where Linux get very helpful. Live instances give you access to all of the tools available on the Linux operating system, as though it were installed on the drive. That means you can mount directories, copy files, and examine in a “clean” mode.  See where this is going? If not, let me explain. Similar elements and procedures are utilised in computer expert forensic witness work. The process of recovering data using Linux Let's say you have a Windows 10 system that, for whatever reason, will no longer boot. You have tested the hard drive and nothing is coming up wrong, so the issue may be either the motherboard or Windows itself, or some corrupted element or artefact.  And there is data that you must have “existent” on that internal drive. To recover that data, you burn a Linux distribution onto a flash drive (using a tool like Unetbootin), insert the flash drive in to the system in question, and boot from the flash drive. When prompted, click ‘Try Ubuntu’ (or whatever nomenclature your chosen distribution uses). Once the live instance is up and running, you then must locate the drive in question, which can be found with the command: sudo sfdisk -l This command will print out a list of all drives attached to the machine - similar to Figure B, below. As you can see, in Linux, drives are labelled in the form of /dev/sdX (where X is a letter). This is where things can get a slightly complex, especially if you have multiple drives attached to the un-bootable machine, or machine to be retained in a forensically protected mode. If there is only one drive, chances are good it will be labelled: /dev/sda. If there's more than one drive, you'll probably have to take the time and mount all of the drives, until you find the data in question. To mount a drive means you are mounting a drive to a directory, so the data is accessible. Let's do that.  First open a terminal window and create a temporary directory with the command: sudo mkdir /data With the directory in place, we can mount the drive to it. Let us assume the drive is an NTFS file system, found on /dev/sdb. To mount this drive to our newly created directory, we'd issue a  command like: sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /data -o force Why the 1? Because, most likely, your data is housed on the first partition - unless the drive was partitioned differently. For this, you might have to use a little trial and error, such as: sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb /data -o force or  sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb2 /data -o force Eventually, you'll succeed in locating and mounting the Windows drive, which means all of the containing data will be found in the newly-created /data directory. You can either use the command line or the file manager to navigate into that directory. You should then see folders such as: Documents and Settings Program Files System Volume Information WINDOWS What to do with that data? Once you have located the folder housing your data from the Windows drive, you can easily copy it. To do that, plug in another USB drive (leaving the one with the Live distribution in place) and click on the entry in the left pane of the file manager to mount that drive (similar to Figure C, below).  Navigate to the folder housing the data to be copied (say it is named ‘client_data’) and right-click the folder in question. Select Copy from the menu (Figure D, below). Once the data finishes copying, navigate to the newly attached USB drive in the file manager, right-click somewhere in the right pane, and select Paste (Figure E, below).  When the data pasting has finished, you can then unmount the USB drive containing the copied data by clicking the upward pointing area associated with the drive in the file manager left-hand pane.  Congratulations, you just recovered data from an inaccessible Windows drive using Linux. Copy that data to a working machine and you are back up and running. Forensic Investigation, Analysis and Problem Determination use very similar processes, with the added steps of making the target read-only; and then running Linux-based utilities against the: target drive, USB thumb drive/stick, server, or other defined computer facility. These steps can be used as part of computer expert Forensic Witness process, and is therefore part of the software toolkit for professional Expert Witness. Computer forensics for law enforcement runs in the same way. I will cover some elements in a later post.</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic</image:title>
      <image:caption>FIGURE B</image:caption>
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      <image:loc>https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/602b9f99d6914a529ef155b3/1613655973542-96WTBWUDW26RJZJAYKJZ/recovery4.jpg</image:loc>
      <image:title>DigitalForensic</image:title>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic</image:title>
      <image:caption>FIGURE C</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic</image:title>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic</image:title>
      <image:caption>Figure E</image:caption>
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      <image:title>DigitalForensic</image:title>
      <image:caption>Completed Forensic Investigation</image:caption>
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    <lastmod>2024-12-11</lastmod>
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      <image:title>wirecard</image:title>
      <image:caption>In a German Tech Giant’s Fall, Charges of Lies, Spies and Missing Billions A case involving e-cards and cryptocurrency - the preliminary foothills of Wirecard, and dependent on your viewpoint some room for fintech or IT irregularities. Markus Braun built Wirecard to “conquer the world,” but those aspirations attracted sceptics. Its accounting scandal has sent shock waves through Germany. In the elite corridors of corporate Germany, Markus Braun had become a legend. A little-known entrepreneur until just a few years ago, Mr. Braun had forged an obscure Bavarian company called Wirecard into a German tech icon, winning a coveted spot on the benchmark DAX stock index. Wirecard provided the invisible financial plumbing that, with a wave of plastic over a card reader almost anywhere in the world, made transactions happen. Hedge funds and global investors scrambled to buy shares. When critics raised red flags about the company’s seemingly miraculous success, questioning murky accounts and income that could not be traced, Mr. Braun, a methodical executive from Austria who was the company’s biggest shareholder, hit back repeatedly, and the stock price skyrocketed. But in June 2020, Mr. Braun’s empire came crashing down after Wirecard filed for insolvency proceedings, days after the financial technology company acknowledged that 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) that it claimed to have on its balance sheets probably never existed. Its longtime auditor, EY, formerly Ernst &amp; Young, said the company had carried out “an elaborate and sophisticated fraud.” Mastercard and Visa said Friday that they were considering cutting ties. Wirecard, which owes creditors €3.5 billion, said its survival was not assured, sending its battered shares below €2 from over €100 in early 2020. The European Commission opened an investigation into Germany’s financial regulator for failing to catch the problems, despite numerous reports of wrongdoing. How one of Germany’s most feted companies fell from grace - it was the first listed member of the 30-year-old DAX to go bust - is something investigators in several countries are still trying to piece together. German prosecutors arrested Mr. Braun on accusations of inflating sales volume with fake income to lure investors, and authorities are searching for Jan Marsalek, his former chief operating officer, who was fired and may be in Asia. The Philippine government is investigating the missing €1.9 billion, which Wirecard claimed to have held in two Philippine banks; the banks said that they had never dealt with Wirecard. But one thing is sure: Anyone paying attention should not have been surprised. Since 2008, Wirecard had attracted sceptics who wondered how the company could generate the worldwide revenue it claimed. The questions, raised by analysts and investigated in a series of articles in The Financial Times, were repeatedly waved away by Mr. Braun, whose global ambitions grew with the stock price. Wirecard and lawyers for Mr. Braun did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Braun did not enter a plea before he was freed on bail, because he was not charged. Though Wirecard was smaller and less known globally than rivals like PayPal, the criticism was seen as an attack on a homegrown success story. It drew the attention of Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin, which investigated the people asking the questions - often short-sellers, who stood to gain by falling shares, and journalists - rather than those with repeated allegations of financial shenanigans. Critics said they were subject to a harassment campaign, including phishing attacks by hackers to gain access to email accounts and intimidating surveillance outside their homes and offices. Wirecard has denied any wrongdoing. Scrutiny of BaFin has intensified since the president, Felix Hufeld, acknowledged that officials had failed to prevent a calamity. “The situation is a complete disaster,” he said. Britain’s financial regulator on Friday ordered Wirecard’s U.K. subsidiary, which handles e-payments and prepaid cards, to suspend activities for a while. And EY, which faces litigation from distressed shareholders and bondholders who say it didn’t do its job, now says it was duped: “There are clear indications that this was an elaborate and sophisticated fraud involving multiple parties around the world.” Mr. Braun, 50, who lives in Vienna, joined the Munich-based company in 2002 when it was a fledgling start-up and on the verge of collapse. A computer science expert and self-described “pathological optimist,” he had previously worked for KPMG’s consulting business. He built up Wirecard by initially offering its services to pornography and gambling sites - growing businesses that other online payment companies tended to avoid. By 2005 the company was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and Mr. Braun opened a banking division, which issued Visa and Mastercard credit cards. Questions about Wirecard’s finances began surfacing in 2008 after the head of a German shareholder association alleged the company’s 2007 consolidated accounts were incomplete and misleading. Wirecard hired EY to conduct an audit, which showed no irregularities. An author of the association’s report was prosecuted and briefly jailed for not disclosing short positions he held in Wirecard stock, from which he profited when the share price fell. Wirecard continued to prosper by making contactless payments seem effortless, and attracting what it said were thousands of new merchants. Between 2011 and 2014, the company raised €500 million from shareholders and began an aggressive international expansion. It bought up small third-party payments companies called merchant acquirers around Asia, luring more investors and lifting the share price. The accounting scandal centers on escrow accounts set up by several of those businesses, which allowed Wirecard to operate in countries where it didn’t have a license, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Dubai and beyond. The merchant acquirers, which provide retailers with credit card payment terminals that were then plugged into Wirecard’s payments system, generated a large chunk of revenue and profit for the company over years. They were supposed to have deposited revenue for Wirecard into the escrow accounts. But the company said this week that the funds might never have existed. Analysts and short-sellers said they had quickly noticed irregularities. Mark Hiley, a founding partner of the London-based independent research provider The Analyst, which makes recommendations for short-sellers, was among a handful of outspoken critics. Since 2014, he has written 43 reports highlighting why Wirecard was what he called “a house of cards” as it dished out hundreds of millions of euros to acquire such operations throughout Asia. “When you looked at the local companies’ financial filings, you could see they were very small businesses, with very low revenue and limited profitability,” Mr. Hiley said. “We were concerned: Why were they paying so much money for these small, barely profitable companies?” The mystery deepened when Wirecard reported the merchant acquirers were suddenly raking in big money. “They literally went from unprofitable businesses to highly profitable ones in the first year,” Mr. Hiley said. “It just didn’t pass the smell test.” The businesses provided Wirecard monthly reports of combined revenue from merchant transactions, but no detailed breakdown, according to Mr. Hiley. While Wirecard said such income eventually accounted for around half its total revenues — making Wirecard look ever more profitable to investors — the arrangement prevented Wirecard’s auditors from being able to verify the accounts. Scrutiny grew when Wirecard bought an Indian payments business for €340 million in 2015, its biggest deal to date. That year, J Capital Research, which provides investment advisory services, published a report stating that Wirecard’s Asia operations were smaller than the company had led investors to believe. Wirecard accused short-sellers of paying for the report. The next year, Financial Times journalists who had begun running a series of articles raising similar questions, as well as analysts, hedge funds and short-sellers who had been critical of Wirecard, reported becoming targets of prolonged hacking campaigns. Among them was Matthew Earl, an investor and co-author of a report by Zatarra, a financial research and investigations firm that claimed to have identified alleged money laundering inside the Wirecard empire. Mr. Earl said he suspected that Wirecard was falsifying its profit and balance sheets, partly through buying companies at high prices — including the Indian firm — where the purchase money went to related parties and was then returned back to Wirecard. Soon after the reports were published, Mr. Earl said, he started being followed and watched at his home and office, and became the target of a phishing campaign featuring sophisticated emails that included extensive personal details about him and his family. “I estimate I received a total of 3,000 phishing emails, while emails were also fabricated and circulated to discredit me,” Mr. Earl said in an interview. He said he had also received “extremely aggressive letters” from Wirecard’s lawyers that threatened a libel suit and a police complaint. Mr. Hiley of The Analyst recounted a similar experience when he sent an investigator to India last year to verify his suspicion that the business was not bringing in as much money as Wirecard claimed. When the investigator went to the address listed for the local affiliate in Chennai, he found a small office in a dilapidated building. The investigator called Mr. Hiley immediately. “There is no real business here,” Mr. Hiley recalled the investigator’s telling him. “There’s a few employees, a few broken laptops, but I can’t find any customers,” the investigator added. When the investigator left, Mr. Hiley said, he was followed in his taxi “by a couple of guys in tuk tuks,” and was so spooked that he changed hotels for safety. Despite the critical reports, Wirecard was becoming part of Germany’s corporate elite. It leapt into the DAX index in September 2018, knocking out the stalwart Commerzbank and causing a sensation in the country. In April 2019, BaFin filed a criminal complaint against several short-sellers and two Financial Times journalists after Wirecard accused them of negative reporting to drive down the share price. Mr. Braun was moving more into the spotlight, becoming an A-list speaker at technology and payment conferences, where he was hailed as a “hero” and “rock star,” and eventually began wearing Steve Jobs-style black turtlenecks. He promoted the concept of a fully cashless society from which players like Wirecard stood to benefit, and predicted that all retail payments would be digital within a decade. “The aim of the board is to conquer the world in a powerful, organic way,” the German newspaper Welt reported him saying in 2018. But late last year, as more reports of suspected wrongdoing emerged, the company delayed EY’s annual report for 2019 and hired KPMG to provide an independent assessment of its books. The audit, released in April, did little to douse the growing fire. In the most serious finding, covering 2016 to 2018, KPMG said it was unable to verify the existence of €1 billion in revenue that Wirecard booked through three third-party acquiring partners. As institutional investors called on him to resign, Mr. Braun remained defiant, saying the audit had found no evidence of wrongdoing. He refused to restate Wirecard’s accounts for those years. German financial regulators redirected their scrutiny from critics to the company itself. On June 5 2020, prosecutors raided Wirecard headquarters and opened proceedings against management on suspicion of releasing misleading information that may have affected Wirecard’s share price. On June 17, EY said it would not publish its long-delayed annual report and audit because it could not account for the missing €1.9 billion. Mr. Braun and the board said the company was the victim of fraud. But two days later, Mr. Braun was out. By Friday 26 June 2020, Wirecard had all but crumpled into insolvency. Acknowledgments to: Financial Times, BBC, KPMG, NY Times, and Fintechfutures, for reporting.</image:caption>
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