Who Needs 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 you or your business should hire Digital Investigation:
- Investigating Security Breaches or Other Policy Violations at a Business
- HIPAA violations
- Theft of trade secrets or intellectual property
- Accounting fraud
- Investigating employee actions
- Inappropriate material
- Email abuse
- Instant messaging abuse
- Non-business related activity / policy violations
- Investigating Use of Personal Electronic Devices
- Recover deleted call logs, IM conversations, track movements with geo-tagging
- Gather data from personal computers, including:
- Images
- Webmail
- Internet artifacts
- Web history and cache
- Chat sessions
- And more
- Protecting your children from potential online predators
- Protecting yourself from a cheating spouse
If you are considering doing a digital investigation on your own - whether for personal or business purposes - stop now. Let the experts at Digital Investigation help you complete your investigation the right way.
Benefits of Hiring Digital Investigation 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 legaly 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
- 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 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, don’t try to do it yourself. Let the experts at Digital Investigation help you.