Forensic Investigation - 10 Steps to Forensic Readiness

Author: Anastasia Isabelle Wallen

When it comes to an information security incident, forensic investigation of any evidence is the best post-event response to do. This is because there are many cases where an organization may benefit from gathering and preserving circumstantial evidence even before an incident occurs.

As a forensic investigator, you need to be forensic ready to organize and maximize the use of evidence. This is to minimize the cost of any investigation that you will conduct.

Forensic Investigation

It is a scientific method to solve a case where forensic experts gather and analyses all incident-related physical evidence. This investigation is performed to make an unbiased, objective, and independent forensic conclusion about a suspect. But not all forensic investigation has the same process as there are many different types of forensics.

Types of Forensic Investigations

  • Forensic Accounting
  • Forensic Dentistry
  • Forensic Pathology
  • Forensic Psychology
  • Forensic Science
  • Forensic Toxicology
  • Forensic Science
  • Forensic Archaeology
  • Forensic Entomology
  • Crime Scene Forensics

These are just some of the types of forensic investigation that can be done to help gather evidence and solve a case. And a professional investigator follows the goals of forensic readiness before conducting an investigation.

Forensic Readiness Goals

  1. Legally gather admissible pieces of evidence without interfering with business processes
  2. Gather evidence for the potential incident
  3. Minimize interruption to any organization, when conducting an investigation.
  4. Conduct an investigation while proceeding at a cost in proportion to the situation.
  5. Ensure that the gather evidence makes a positive impact on the outcome of the investigation of any legal action.

And to follow these goals, you need to follow the key activities while implementing forensic readiness.

Steps to Forensic Readiness

1. Define Scenario

You need to define the purpose of the evidence collection. You need to look at what are the risk and potential impact of your evidence from the types of case and disputes. \

By doing so the organization may benefit from this like:

  • Reducing the impact of the incident
  • Effectively dealing with court orders
  • Compliance with the legal constraints
  • Gather evidence in support to company disciplinary issues
  • Proving the impact of the crime case

2. Identify the potential evidence and available sources

This is to identify what are the sources of the potential evidence, source of this evidences, and what are the possible potential evidence that could be generated by the system. This is to know what the possible scopes of evidence that can be available to be used in the investigations are. You also have to know the range of the possible evidence sources and the type of collection of evidence to be used.

3. Identify the evidence collection requirements

You need to know and identify if the evidence can be gathered without interfering the normal business operation. This is also to ensure if it can minimize the interruption to the business.

4. Capable of securing the legally admissible evidence

Any physical pieces of evidence or paper works that can be associated to the investigation must be given with great security.

5. Ensure legal review

In facilitating action in response to the incident, you need to ensure legal reviews. Legal advisers can give you advice on what is the strength of the evidence to the case. They can also suggest what the measures that can be taken.

Wrapping Up:

Forensic readiness is very important to ensure that the investigation is a success and can give an unbiased, objective, and independent forensic conclusion in every case. So if you are looking for an answer to any investigation that you can trust, you can seek help for a professional and trusted forensic investigator to help you whether it is expert witnesses, engineering consulting, failure investigations and more.