Forensic recovery can help legal implications

Posted by adairsawyer on December 16th, 2012

Today most employees have laptops assigned to them and also use their own mobile phones for the purpose of work. Companies are increasingly looking to cut operating costs by letting employees work from home or remote locations. One downside of this arrangement is that the employees and their work assets cannot be tracked all the time. A company will not only be dealing with dishonest employees but also with external threats that would look to access data from employee assets without the employees even being aware of it. To counter these problems it is important that digital investigators are hired to carry on inspections at regular intervals. These investigators can do forensic recovery of all data that may have been used to purport any fraud.

Let us take an employee’s laptop for instance. With the kind of modern hacking techniques in use the employee may not even be aware of the fact that someone is stealing data from their laptop. What digital investigators can do is access the laptop onsite or remotely and collect required data from it. Data recovery doesn’t mean that every file is opened and copied. It involves copying images of the hard drive without compromising any data. A thorough forensic recovery of the data can then be done to look into possible hacking attempts or assess the damage that has been done already.

A more serious threat is when an employee chooses to use business data for their own use. This is a serious integrity issue and has to be handled with strong hands. Often the problem here is that the employee’s assets are not readily available for tracking. Someone may be working from home throughout the month and only comes to office once a couple of weeks. And if the data theft is done using a smartphone then tracking that is even more difficult. But thanks to advancements in forensic recovery techniques all data can be tracked no matter where the employee is. Digital investigators use advanced software applications for this purpose and any data theft can be eliminated.

You may question the necessity of paying money to digital investigators for doing this job when an IT person in the organization can access any workstation using administrative login and password. The chances are high that the right procedures for forensic recovery will not followed when an internal employee does the data recovery. If the case goes to the court then the defense lawyer may question the integrity of the collected data. But when you hire a professional this can never happen. These experts are experienced doing these jobs and they can collect data in a way that it is never compromised. Moreover, an expert can collect data from anywhere using the most modern applications. Even if someone deletes data or the storage device the data can still be collected.

Bottom line – if you want forensic recovery done in a professional manner you cannot do without professional digital investigators. This is how the data collected can be presented as evidence.

Forensic recovery has become an important profession today thanks to the digital crimes that are committed so frequently. Professional digital investigators can recover digital data in a manner that can legally implicate some wrong doer.