Digital Forensics

Digital evidence is more prevalent than ever in modern society, especially with the popularity of smartphones and tablets. According to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), digital evidence is commonly associated with electronic crime, such as credit card fraud, but is also useful in other crimes.[1] Digital evidence must be recovered, digitally copied, and the copied version will be processed by an analyst trained to search for and recover hidden or deleted data. Digital evidence may be found on smart phones, computers, gaming systems, cameras, and other electronic devices, as well as on storage devices such as external hard drives, SD cards, USB drives, or CDs. Photographs, videos, internet history, computer files, GPS records, emails, and social media records are all examples of digital evidence that may be recovered and subsequently analyzed.

Refer to chapter 5 of the 2009 NAS report on forensic science for further descriptions of digital and multimedia analysis.[2]