The job: Digital forensics investigator
As told to Rhymer Rigby
Published: October 24 2010 19:47 | Last updated: October 24 2010 19:47
Phil Beckett of Navigant
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Forensic investigation involves analysing all kinds of electronic media – BlackBerrys, hard drives, phones, laptops – to recover useful information. For instance, if someone were being disciplined for downloading movies on a smartphone, we could find which movies they had downloaded.
You don’t always find a “smoking gun” document, but you often find things such as time stamps that allow you to see when machines have been accessed.
In some cases people try to erase information by formatting discs or reinstalling the operating system. But as these don’t overwrite the disc, you can usually recover quite a lot.
We’ve also had cases where computers have been thrown away or damaged. If a computer has been sitting outside in a bin and is soaked, we might have to take the hard drive apart, clean it and buy new components until we can recover some of the data on it.
Most of our cases come through lawyers but we work for everyone from financial institutions and manufacturing to the public sector. We’ve even done a casino where there was a suspicious win pattern.
What I really enjoy is that when you pick up the phone you have no idea what you’re going to be asked to do. There’s a real detective element to it.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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