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In the context of an organization, digital forensics can be used to identify and investigate both cybersecurity incidents and physical security incidents.

Most commonly, digital forensics (evidence) is used as part of the incident response process to detect that a breach occurred, identify the root cause and threat actors, eradicate the threat, and provide evidence for legal teams and law enforcement authorities.

With the evolution in digital technologies, organizations have been forced to change the way they plan, develop, and enact their information technology strategies. This is because modern digital technologies do not only present new opportunities to business organizations, but also a different set of issues and challenges that need to be resolved.

With the rising threats of cybercrimes, for example, which have been accelerated by the emergence of new digital technologies, many organizations, as well as law enforcement agencies globally, are now erecting proactive measures as a way to increase their ability to respond to security incidents as well as create a digital forensic ready environment.

According to experts in this field, to enable digital forensics, organizations must centrally manage logs and other digital evidence, ensure they retain it for a long enough period, and protect it from tampering, malicious access, or accidental loss.

Perhaps the most important step in carrying out a digital forensics investigation is the collection phase. This involves acquiring digital evidence, usually by seizing physical assets, such as computers, hard drives, or phones. It is critical to ensure that data is not lost or damaged during the collection process. You can prevent data loss by copying storage media or creating images of the original.

This is followed up by the examination phase, which focuses on identifying and extracting data. You can split this phase into several steps—prepare, extract, and identify.

When preparing to extract data, you can decide whether to work on a live or dead system. For example, you can power up a laptop to work on it live or connect a hard drive to a lab computer.

Analysis follows, where digital examiners need answers to questions like:

  • Who created the data
  • Who edited the data
  • How the data was created
  • When these activities occurred

Want to learn more? Tonex offers Digital Forensics Training Bootcamp, an intense 2-day course designed to train digital forensics examiners, analysts and fraud investigators. Students are taught electronic discovery and advanced digital forensic techniques. This course is essential to anyone encountering digital forensic and evidence while conducting an investigation.

Additionally, Tonex offers nearly 400 classes, seminars and workshops in close to four dozen categories of systems engineering training.

For more information, questions, comments, contact us.

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