A couple of weeks ago, Avansic hosted the webinar Digital Forensics Saves the Day – Top Cases in Review with Dr. Gavin Manes and Lance Watson of Avansic, and Craig Ball of the Ball in Your Court blog with a lot of great info about digital forensics, how it differs from eDiscovery and some excellent case study examples of how it can be useful! Avansic posted a follow-up blog post on that webinar, as well as the uses for automated data detection, which extends to something perhaps more commonly applicable to many organizations.
The blog post (Authenticity of Evidence, Document Authentication & More – Forensics Saves the Day) recaps some more aspects of the webinar, including authentication of evidence, with discussion of the case Rossbach v. Montefiore Med. Ctr. (which I covered here) and other examples, such as faking a document with an incorrect date and Gavin’s lightning quick modification of a PDF of the Beatles contract with the Ed Sullivan show. And that’s just one forensics case study they discussed.
Speaking of authentication, I submitted a comment during the webinar (which Gavin mentioned) about a case I covered in 2019 where a farm declaration dated in 2004 was written in Microsoft’s Calibri font. The problem with that? Calibri wasn’t widely available until 2007. Oops!
The blog post also discusses automated data detection for authentication of data, identification of missing data and detection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), among other uses. As Avansic notes: “Currently, we have automated techniques to detect bad dates and times, missing emails and email threads, PII detection, altered metadata, and hidden data within native documents (such as track changes in Word or hidden cells in Excel).”
Avansic also teases a future webinar to discuss more manual and automated data detection techniques, integrating the technology into platforms like iCONECT, which sounds interesting. Stay tuned!
Here’s a link to the post and a link to the “Forensics Saves the Day” webinar from earlier this month. Check them out!
So, what do you think? What automated data detection mechanisms does your organization use in discovery and forensics? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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