What Is Digital Forensics?

Digital forensics is the process of uncovering and interpreting electronic data. The goal of the process is to preserve any evidence in its most original form while performing a structured investigation by collecting, identifying, and validating the digital information to reconstruct past events. The context is most often for the usage of data in a court of law, though digital forensics can be used in other instances as well.

Digital forensics has 5 basic steps:

1. Identification: First you must find the evidence and note where it is stored.
2. Preservation: Next you must isolate, secure, and preserve the data. This includes preventing people from possibly tampering or changing the evidence.
3. Analysis: Next we must reconstruct fragments of data and draw a conclusion based on the evidence that is found.
4. Documentation: Following analysis we create a record of all the data to recreate the crime scene.
5. Presentation: Lastly we must summarize the information found and draw a conclusion as to what has happened.

When is Digital Forensics Used?

In businesses Digital Forensics is often a very important part of the incident response process. Our team of Forensic Investigators identify and record the details of a criminal incident as evidence to be used for law enforcement. The rules and regulations that surround this process are often very instrumental in proving innocence or guilt in a court of law.

How Cosaint Cyber® Can Help

Imagine that a security breach happens at a company and it results in stolen data. In this situation our forensic analysts would come in and determine how attackers gained access to the network and where they traversed the network. We can also then determine what they did on the network and whether they took information or planted malware. We will aim to recover all data related to the incident including but not limited to documents, photos, and emails from computer hard drives or other data storage devices that may have been used.