John Holden highlights how advances in technology can help with workplace computer investigations
Ninety per cent of today’s written communication is estimated to be electronic, of which 70% never gets printed. Our computers log not only what documents we create, but also what time we start work, when we break for lunch and when we leave for home. They can record how we have changed a document, where we have sought additional input and what we did in the meantime. Some “deleted” documents are just set to one side and can be recovered at the click of a mouse. It is now more difficult to obtain all the documents relevant to a case. To address this change in the business environment, a relatively new discipline called forensic technology has developed. Professionals in this field can recover, interpret and present data that may otherwise have been unavailable for review, using specially designed tools.
The most important part of this process is gathering the source data. Unless this is carried out properly there could be adverse consequences down the line. The most
