Computer Forensics For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Knowing What Your Digital Devices Create, Capture, and Pack Away — Until Revelation Day

In This Chapter

• Finding electronic evidence in the digital trails of our lives

• Whipping your evidence into shape

• Looking for evidence in the visible and invisible computer domain

• Looking at the life cycle of a case

• Defending your results

Think of computers, cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and other handheld devices as items with durable digital brains. Imagine that a detailed copy of every e-mail, text message, document, Internet upload or download, Google search, Facebook personal chat and posting, iPhone webChatter conversation, photo, financial transaction, and address book gets packed into electronic closets.

The amount of information left in each of these places is the basic reason that criminals are caught and found guilty and lawsuits are won or lost. When you use computer forensics tools to pick these digital brains or find skeletons in electronic closets, your case takes shape with e-evidence that's tough to refute. Electronic evidence (e-evidence, for short) can play a starring role in the civil, criminal, matrimonial, or workplace cases you investigate. It's as though people who use digital devices and social networks missed every CSI episode where incriminating e-mail, cell calls, and online activity became courtroom exhibits.

In this chapter, you become familiar with the locations and staying power of the all-too-accurate electronic records of actions, decisions, and indiscretions. ...