Criminal Investigations: Digital Forensics

With the advent of increasingly innovative digital technologies, the way investigations are conducted has profoundly changed. Activities carried out exclusively through electronic devices are continuously growing; for this reason, digital evidence is becoming increasingly important and decisive. Digital investigations complement traditional ones.

What is digital forensics?

Digital forensics is a branch of forensic science and investigation that deals with recovering, collecting, analyzing, and presenting digital evidence to solve crimes or investigate legal issues or cybersecurity incidents. This activity may include examining electronic devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets, and generally all tools capable of storing data.

What is the purpose of digital forensics?

Digital forensics, or computer forensics, is employed in various investigative fields: civil, corporate, criminal, or cybersecurity. In civil matters, digital evidence can support claims for damages or investigate alleged illicit activities.

Companies can use digital forensics to investigate internal fraud, cybersecurity breaches, or other behaviors within the organization. In criminal investigations, digital evidence can be crucial to establish the guilt or innocence of a person involved in a crime.

Finally, in cases of cybersecurity breaches or cyberattacks, digital forensics can help identify the perpetrators, modus operandi, and understand the extent of the damage suffered.

Key points of digital forensics

1. Identification, collection, and data acquisition: In the realm of uncodified criminal evidence, digital evidence emerges as a form that escapes physical materiality. The most delicate phase is certainly the acquisition of digital information, which, to avoid compromising subsequent trial phases with potential expert reports containing “non-genuine” data, requires that the examination and analysis of digital traces be performed on a “snapshot” of the original digital media.
2. Digital forensic analysis: Experts in computer forensics analyze the involved electronic devices such as computers, mobile phones, and tablets using specialized software. Argo professionals can extract hidden data and recover deleted files. Our private investigators collect digital evidence such as emails, photos, videos, text messages, call logs, GPS location data, and other data from electronic devices. The recovered evidence is useful and often crucial to obtain information on communications, movements, and any suspicious activities.
3. Final report: At the conclusion of the technical activities, a detailed descriptive report is prepared outlining the methodologies used and the operations performed to achieve the analysis of the digital data. The report, as delivered by Argo, can be directly submitted as evidence in court.

Argo Cyber

Digital forensics activities require technical expertise and in-depth knowledge to ensure that collected evidence is valid and appropriately handled for possible court presentation. For this reason, it is advisable to rely on a highly qualified agency like Argo S.p.A. and its division, Argo Cyber.

Argo Cyber is a unique high-tech and specialist project that, leveraging highly qualified professionals and the most advanced IT technologies, identifies innovative and customized solutions for its clients.

Argo’s forensic IT investigations are aimed at individuals, law firms, and companies. Request a free consultation at +44(0)7435131959, or contact us via chat or the form below.