These days we all have constant access to digital data through the ever-evolving range of electronic mobile devices.
We all have our own digiprint (a bit like a footprint but harder to eradicate) that leaves a trail across our social media platforms, call and text histories. This makes it much harder to get away with those extramarital activities, because although you may think that you deleted the incriminating text, location update, call history or text, there are Forensic data recovery experts out there, that can find the smallest digital detail that can prove guilt or more rarely innocence.
Digital data is stored on your device in a variety of ways: –
- Internal memory. Memory that is built in to your device at the time of purchase. Operating systems, some apps and browsing history will be usually stored here.
- Sim cards. Not only will there be a list of contacts on your Sim, there is going to be a list of received and dialled calls.
- Memory cards. Normally you would opt to save data here, however there may be a setting that means a programme or app automatically saves data to the memory card.
How Is Forensic Data Recovery Carried out?
Lets move on to the two main ways that a private detective can use forensic data recovery.
Logical Acquisition: –
The investigator needs to connect the device to a computer. They could then essentially just create a backup of any data on the device. There are certain advantages to this method. The device does not get broken and the data backed-up is in its original format with the original date and time stamps. The main downside is the difficulty in accessing data that has been deleted.
Physical Acquisition: –
This is best used after the logical acquisition technique has been implemented if there are still doubts about the fidelity of your partner or whatever it is that is being investigated. It is a software solution. The programme is loaded in to the start-up system of the device. Usually it can bypass passwords. This method is likely to recover any data that has ever been accessed on the device, however there is the slight risk that date and time stamps of the existing data may have been altered.
The evidence that is obtained by these methods can be produced in a Court of Law as evidence if the data has been handled in accordance with the rules of digital evidence collection.
All this is good news for those that suspect that they have a cheating husband or wife, or somebody who is being dishonest at work, but not so good for the ones doing the cheating or dishonesty.
