Who Might Need a Digital Investigation?

While it is possible that you may need to initiate forensic data collection to submit to court on your own, there are many reasons when you or your business may need to perform a digital investigation:

  • Investigation of Security Breaches or Other Policy Violations

    • Compliance violations (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, HITRUST, GDPR, ISO etc)
    • Insider Threat Theft of trade secrets or intellectual property
    • Accounting fraud
    • Investigating employee activity
      • Accessing or creation of inappropriate material
      • Email abuse
      • Instant messaging abuse
      • Non-business related activity / policy violations
  • Investigation Use of Personal Electronic Devices
    • Recover deleted call logs, IM conversations, track movements with geo-tagging
    • Gather data from personal computers, including:
      • Email
      • Images
      • Webmail
      • Internet artifacts
      • Web history and cache
      • Chat sessions
      • And more
    • Protecting children from potential online predators
    • Protecting yourself from a cheating spouse

Benefits of Hiring a Digital Investigator to Handle your Case

Computer savvy moms and dads often believe they can adequately protect their children from online predators. A home computer guru believes he or she can tell if a spouse is cheating. That’s not necessarily the case. When someone wants to hide something, they delete the data. This information can be recovered, but attempting to do so without the proper training and tools can result in the data being rendered invalid as legal evidence, or even becoming permanently lost.

Ensure All Potential Evidence is Uncovered, Even Deleted Data

The same is true in a corporate setting. Many businesses opt not to outsource internal investigations, and instead rely on an already existing IT team that is not specifically trained for digital investigations. Even highly educated and trained IT personnel can make mistakes when performing a private digital investigation, rendering crucial evidence legally invalid or even losing it forever.

Data can be Gathered from Nearly any Digital Source

Nearly any digital source can have evidence on it, including:

  • Personal desktops and laptops
  • RAID workstations
  • Servers
  • Hard disk drives
  • RAM
  • USB / Flash Drives
  • CD / DVD disks
  • Smartphones
  • Tablets

Attempting to complete your own investigation can lead to important evidence going undiscovered because you lack the proper tools and techniques.

Any Data / File Type can Provide Digital Evidence

Often, data that is important evidence in a digital forensic investigation can exist in a file format you are not equipped to open or process. Because we are data recovery professionals, we are equipped to handle all types of files. This ensures that no evidence is left uncovered during our digital forensic investigations. Evidence can come in any file type, including:

  • Documents
  • Images
  • Email
  • Webmail
  • Internet artifacts
  • Web history and cache
  • Chat sessions
  • Compressed files
  • Backup files
  • Encrypted files

One of the biggest consequences of performing your own digital investigation, aside from inadvertently losing data, is potentially corrupting evidence. If the data collected during an investigation is not properly documented and maintained, there is a strong potential for it to be inadmissible in court. Even worse, it can result in making further evidence from that source impossible to acquire legally. In other words, an improperly conducted digital investigation can taint the source of the evidence.

Evidence is Presented in a Neat, Easy-to-Follow Format

Even if your initial intention is not to gather evidence for court, there is always potential that the evidence recovered may lead to a legal proceeding. Whether the digital investigation is for personal or business reasons, you could find yourself in the middle of criminal proceedings – prosecution of a predator, prosecution of theft, etc – or civil proceedings – divorce, wrongful termination, etc. By allowing the trained professionals at Digital Investigation to perform your investigation, you will ensure it is done properly.

Benefit from Other Features

Digital Investigation Services Consultants can also offer other benefits: HTML page reconstruction, data reconstruction (recovery of deleted data), data from incomplete RAID arrays (in some cases), deleted call history or chat conversations, location movements plotted on a map and much more.

If you need a digital investigation or you need evidence collected, don’t try to do it yourself.   Contact Us and let the experts at Digital Investigation Services help you.