Digital forensics: industry features, purposes and cases

It turned out that Harris regularly searched for information about the age of consent in Georgia, as well as "how to survive in prison". He had an affair with a seventeen-year-old high school student and regularly sexted with underage girls — Ross was also doing it that evening while his son was dying in a locked car.

However, this was not all the evidence — the investigation showed that in addition to his interest in websites with minors, Ross actively visited child-free resources and googled which car was most suitable for killing a child.

After analyzing all the evidence, the police came to the conclusion that Harris killed his son on purpose to have a life unencumbered by children and continue to come into contact with young girls.

Digital forensics (digital forensics)appeared in the mid-1970s as one of the areas of computer forensics and for a long time was focused mainly on cyber attacks, data leaks and other similar cases.

Over the next 50 years, digital forensics has been actively developing and changing, so at the moment it exists as a separate field (since 2005 it even has its own ISO standard).

Its main purposes are:

In addition to the departments within the special services, many private companies have appeared around the world, providing services from conducting research to collecting digital evidence: for example, Business Intelligence Associates, FireEye, AccessData abroad, and the Group-IB Laboratory on the Russian market.

However, like other industries, digital forensics faces its own difficulties. The main one inadmissibility of digital data by the court. Sometimes it can be difficult to provide and present "electronic" evidence due to its specifics and the court is not always ready to accept them; also sometimes opinions differ on the interpretation of digital data already attached to the case.

One of the most relevant examples of such an ambiguous interpretation of the collected digital evidence is the Casey Anthony case, which today remains one of the most controversial trials in the history of US justice.

In October 2008, Casey Anthony was charged in Florida with the capital murder of Kaylee Anthony, her two-year-old daughter.

Kaylee's body was found in the woods a few months after she disappeared. During the investigation, it was found that 84 Google requests "chloroform" were made from the Anthony family's home computer in a suitable time period — a little later, from the same IP address, someone made some more searches for the keywords "head injury", "chest fracture", "internal bleeding".

The defense insisted that Kaylee's death was an accident: the child drowned in the pool at home, and her mother, afraid of responsibility, tried to hide the body with the help of her father, George Anthony. Through search queries, they tried to identify the symptoms and signs of injuries that Kaylee might have received by falling into the pool.

On July 5, 2011, Casey Anthony was found not guilty because of the lack of sufficient evidence pointing to the composition of the murder in this case: she received four years in prison for perjury and child abuse.

The number of his victims during all this time was at least ten, and each time he managed to get away. BTK regularly wrote encrypted letters to the police — in 2005, he sent a floppy disk with a Microsoft Word file. There was discovered metadata that was stored on the hard drive of a certain Dennis Rader, which gave the police the opportunity to reach the suspect.