Lately, a worryingly rising number of cases of criminal activity via abuse of Xbox-es and other Net-able gaming equipment have come to light. Most incidents reported at the minute come from the US (e.g. here and here) however this is a situation that needs to be studied carefully further, both in terms of its social as well as its technical aspects.
Gaming consoles are by definition appealing to children and their Internet connection capabilities expose vulnerable users to the same Internet risks that instant messaging or other networking features do over conventional computers. The problem here is that most gaming machines are proprietary, closed source and patented. Most companies are reluctant to release information on the architecture, software etc. features due to commercial purposes. Thus their forensic analysis, that facilitates investigation of incidents like the above and can event contribute to their avoidance, is very difficult.
Thankfully various researchers have got their hands on such machines already (e.g. Burke & Craiger, 2007; Vaughan, 2004 etc.) providing the forensic community with an insight of the particularities of those platforms - there is however quite a lot of work to be done still on this front.
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