Digital Forensics in the Modern Age

¶ … computer forensic offense. Recommendations for investigation will be addressed. Further, an example of an industrial espionage case will be cited. Crimes Committed/Background This lawsuit entailed contract violation cross-claims, with the dispute between the two parties chiefly revolving around events that had transpired during the latter half of 1998. Residential Funding Corporation (RFC) was requested to salvage and present related emails dated from October to December 1998, from its backup drives.

The corporation's internal legal consultant discovered that the company didn't possess requisite internal resources for email retrieval from backup source in the time period allowed. Therefore, the company retained Electronic Evidence Discovery's services, for support with email retrieval. Many weeks into employing established recovery techniques, the corporation was able to present a total of 126 emails (dated between January and August 1998) as well as 2 emails dated September of the same year (Computer Forensic - Computer Forensic Case Studies -- ACE Data Group, n.d).

No emails were presented that were dated in the required critical time period (i.e., Oct-Dec 1998). According to RFC, the absence of responsive electronic messages from the above time period could be attributed to the fact that there simply wasn't any responsive communication in that period, or they weren't present on available backup drives. Despite no email presented by ACE Data recovery being pertinent to this case, it reinforces the assertion that e-discovery and mass-produced recovery tools don't make the best means for data retrieval for litigation purposes.

Moreover, despite RFC not maliciously delaying email release or withholding emails, by failing to employ techniques of recovering like the ones ACE used, they were open to court sanctions. Recommendation for Investigation Several factual observations of the district court were questioned. It was found that the complainant had presented divergent testimony with regard to the exact timing of complainant's decision to engage an external vendor, as well as the timing of actual vendor hiring.

The court raised questions pertaining to the rationality of complainant's continual dependence on the external vendor all through the many months of seemingly futile efforts at critical email retrieval, given the fact that the defendant's vendor was able to accomplish the task in a mere four-day period (Court has Broad Discretion to Fashion Sanctions for Breach of Discovery Obligations -- Electronic Discovery Law, n.d).

Further, the court observed that numerous careless (or else misleading) statements were present in the record, addressed to the defendant and the court by the complainant, with regard to the efforts directed at email retrieval. Thus, in such cases, individual statements must be in agreement with each other. All through the course of the summer, the complainant made numerous misleading or incorrect representations concerning retrieval status as well as when they can present the emails.

On numerous occasions, complainant hinted at the hiring, or potential hiring, of a competent external vendor for aiding in the email recovery process. Complainant refused defendant's offer to try recovering emails using the services of the latter's experts (Court has Broad Discretion to Fashion Sanctions for Breach of Discovery Obligations -- Electronic Discovery Law, n.d). Ultimately, when emails were produced by the complainant, not even one could be found from the required critical time period.

Complainant attempted to account for this void by claiming no responsive emails existed, or if they did exist, they couldn't be accessed. It is advised not to present any sort of misleading representation with regard to evidence status. Industrial Espionage Example In a widely publicized corporate espionage case, experts of ACE Data Group verified that the opponent in the lawsuit, a Venezuelan organization, hacked into the servers of clients, stole sensitive information, and subsequently tried to erase the evidence.

A private protocol was employed by ACE for recovering a total of 92 double-erased e-mails attached with 38 encrypted spreadsheets (Computer Forensic -.