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Updated as of July 2023

Author: Allister D.

Digital Forensics, a branch of forensic sciences, leverages technology to investigate and combat cybercrime. It's the process of identifying, preserving, analyzing, and presenting digital evidence in a legally acceptable manner.

Overview of Digital Forensics

At its core, digital forensics involves the recovery and investigation of material found in digital devices, primarily for use in court proceedings. This field encompasses several sub-disciplines, including network forensics, mobile device forensics, and computer forensics, each focusing on various aspects of digital crime.

The procedure of digital forensics can be broken down into four key stages: The first stage is the collection or identification stage, which involves identifying, labeling, recording, and acquiring data from the possible sources of relevant information, often in a forensically sound manner. The second stage is examination, where forensic technicians use various methodologies and tools to evaluate the collected data. The third state is the analysis stage, which involves extracting valuable details from the examined data and interpreting their relevance to the case. Lastly, the fourth stage is the reporting phase which comprises of documenting the process and findings and ensuring they are understandable to non-technical individuals.

Digital forensics is a critical part of modern law enforcement. It's used to investigate a variety of crimes, such as identity theft, cyberstalking, business disruption, financial fraud, and child exploitation, among others.

Increasing Your Digital Footprint’s Privacy

As technology interweaves into every facet of our lives, maintaining the privacy of our digital footprint has become an essential task. Here are a few strategies to increase your digital footprint’s privacy:

  1. Privacy Settings: Regularly review the privacy settings on all your online accounts and apps. Limit the amount of information that's publicly visible.
  2. VPN + Secure DNS: Use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and a secure DNS resolver when connecting to the internet. A VPN can encrypt your data, making it harder for others to track your online activities and a secure DNS will ensure a private query is made.
  3. Full Device Encryption (FDE): When you device is in it’s fully encrypted state only the decryption key can be used to access your data. If your device ever gets stolen, your data will remain safe even if the criminals try to extract the stored contents.
  4. Delete Old Accounts: Old and abandoned accounts such as social media profiles, gaming accounts, even old financial accounts can be a gold mine for data harvesters, scrapers and hackers. Delete them to reduce the amount of information about you that is out there.
  5. Scrub Metadata: Consider removing geolocation data, EXIF data and other types of metadata before or sending files, photos, etc. over the internet.
  6. Cookie + Ad blocker: Install a good ad blocker or cookie blocker to reduce the information that is collected about you when browsing the web. Also, consider switching to a browser like Brave which includes built in fingerprinting protection. This is will make it harder for companies that collect user data to create a digital profile and identify you.

Sources:

  1. https://www.interpol.int/en/How-we-work/Innovation/Digital-forensics#:~:text=Digital forensics is a branch,crucial for law enforcement investigations
  2. https://www.eccouncil.org/cybersecurity/what-is-digital-forensics/

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