With the ever increasing importance of computers and digital media for both personal and corporate users, the number of crimes involving electronic data is now higher than ever. Thus, only data forensics experts can search computers for electronic evidence, make digital investigations, recover lost data and provide technical expertise in the arena of forensics science. To count only a few of the judicial cases for which data forensics is useful, we ought to mention breach of contract, intellectual property theft, discrimination, sexual harassment and so on. Therefore, it is not that difficult to understand why data forensics is so important in the legal system.
The exact specificity of data forensics is the extraction of pieces of information that would remain undetected at a normal investigation. Data forensics will normally examine files that are hidden, deleted or even discarded, as well as fragments or file left-overs. Although there are lots of challenges when trying to identify the criminal process or to recover data, this search for the needle in the haystack is pretty successful. What is the relevance of such evidence for legal cases? Well, it has been proved by practice that even the course of a trial could be changed by the retrieval of deleted e-mail messages for instance.
Data forensics constantly needs to face apparently insurmountable challenges. The applications are indeed far-reaching, but the work to extract digital evidence is strict and exhausting. Sometimes the extractor has difficulties in getting to the information that is buried too deep in the electronic system, or too exposed to destruction. Moreover, for a successful data collection, data forensics has to protect the extracted elements by duplication so that the information is preserved and not altered and spoiled during the process. Great caution, strict standards and lots of skills are needed for each of these steps and only the best in the field can succeed.
When a criminal act involving digital systems is detected, the best way of action is not to address the other party and ask for a preservation of computer records, but rather a surgical approach by an expert who has had computer forensics training. This will enable the appropriate and cost-limited data collection in the best conditions possible. Moreover, it is false to assume that data forensics only applies to computer hard drives as the main systems that can store information; there are cases of criminal action involving, USB devices, CDs, DVDs and even voice mail systems. Even photocopy machines include hard drives and the scanned or copied documents can be afterwards retrieved from them.


