What is digital forensics?
Understanding Digital Forensics
Digital forensics
Why digital forensics matters
In today’s digital world, nearly every crime or cyberattack leaves behind a digital footprint. According to Microsoft, nearly 90% of all crimes include digital evidence. Digital forensics, which includes computer forensics and mobile forensics, provides the tools and methodologies needed to trace that digital footprint, helping digital forensic investigators and examiners uncover the truth, and ensure that evidence is admissible in court and can be trusted by internal stakeholders, regulators, and legal teams. Digital forensics provides the evidence and clarity needed to make informed decisions and is essential for protecting sensitive information, preserving business continuity, and holding malicious actors accountable.
According to Grand View Research, the digital forensics market is expected to grow to $26.1 billion by 2030. This growth is fueled by rising cybercrime investigations, regulatory demands, insider threats, and the increasing use of digital devices in both personal and enterprise settings.
Who uses digital forensics and why?
Digital forensic examiners or investigators use digital forensics tools to analyze digital evidence from various sources, including computers, mobile devices, networks, and cloud sources. The “DFPulse: The 2024 Digital Forensic Practitioner Survey” indicates that the primary users of digital forensics are law enforcement, government agencies, corporate security teams, and forensic service providers.
Law enforcement agencies: Typically use digital forensics tools to collect, analyze, and preserve electronic evidence during investigations. Typical criminal acts investigated include cases involving cybercrime, fraud, theft, violent crimes, and exploitation. Faced with the challenges of obtaining information from locked devices, investigating diverse data sources, conducting comprehensive data extraction, reconstructing digital activity, and maintaining chain of custody, law enforcement professionals look to digital forensics to ensure thorough investigations, close cases faster, and meet evidentiary standards.
Corporations and businesses: Enterprises use digital forensics solutions to protect intellectual property, investigate data breaches and insider threats, investigate employee misconduct and HR violations, and respond to cybersecurity incidents. Digital forensics enables organizations to collect tamper-proof evidence, understand the scope of incidents, and make data-driven decisions while minimizing risk and reputational damage. It's a key pillar of enterprise cybersecurity and governance.
Government and public sector: Government agencies use digital forensics for national security, public safety, and to investigate threats such as terrorism or organized crime. These tools help gather intelligence and ensure the integrity of digital evidence in legal proceedings, enabling decisive action in high-stakes environments ranging from national defense to local government accountability.
Consulting and cybersecurity firms: These organizations provide digital forensics as a service to clients, assisting with incident response, threat analysis, and evidence collection. They help organizations recover from cyberattacks and strengthen their security posture.
Legal firms and courts: Lawyers and legal professionals use digital forensics to collect, preserve, and analyze digital evidence for civil and criminal cases. This evidence can be pivotal in proving guilt or innocence and in supporting legal arguments.
How does digital forensics uncover the truth
Taking the appropriate steps in a digital forensics investigation is critical because it ensures the integrity, admissibility, and reliability of the evidence:
- Identification: Without knowing where to look, critical data could be overlooked or lost. Early identification shapes the scope and success of the investigation.
- Preservation: Preserving evidence in its original state is essential for maintaining chain of custody and legal admissibility.
- Collection: This step must be performed methodically to avoid contamination, data loss, or introducing bias. It lays the foundation for reliable analysis.
- Examination/analysis: Analysis reveals the who, what, when, where, and how behind the incident. This step provides the investigative insights needed for remediation, legal action, or compliance.
- Documentation/reporting: Clear documentation ensures transparency, supports legal proceedings, and allows results to be reviewed by internal teams, regulators, or in court.
- Presentation/testimony (if required): Communicating technical evidence in a clear, defensible way ensures it holds up under scrutiny and contributes to just outcomes.
Together, these steps ensure that digital investigations are accurate, defensible, and actionable, whether in a courtroom, boardroom, or security operations center (SOC).
Digital forensics vs. digital forensics and incident response (DFIR)?
Digital forensics focuses on the collection, preservation, analysis, and reporting of digital evidence. It's about understanding what happened on a device or network, whether that’s uncovering deleted files, analyzing user activity, or reconstructing timelines. It is typically used by law enforcement, legal teams and forensic analysts in legal investigations, internal audits, and criminal cases to preserve and analyze evidence.
Digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) includes all the elements of digital forensics but expands to include containment and remediation of threats. It’s often used by SOC teams, CISOs, and incident responders in cybersecurity environments to investigate and respond to breaches, malware, or insider threats, minimizing impact, restoring systems, and understanding attack vectors. Think of DFIR as digital forensics plus action, where you not only uncover what happened, but you also do something about it in the moment.
What to look for in an effective digital forensics tool
When evaluating a digital forensics tool, you should look for features that support accuracy, speed, scalability, and legal defensibility, all while aligning with your investigative environment.
Comprehensive evidence collection is the foundation of a reliable, legally sound, and effective investigation. Acquiring data from endpoints, mobile devices, cloud platforms, removable media, and volatile memory ensures investigators have a complete and accurate picture of the incident or activity being examined.
Artifact parsing and recovery is critical in a digital forensics investigation because it allows investigators to extract meaningful, human-readable data from complex system files and unstructured digital traces.
Timeline and correlation analysis are fundamental to digital forensics investigations because they allow investigators to reconstruct events, identify patterns, and uncover evidence that might otherwise remain hidden in large volumes of digital data.
Memory and volatile data analysis are critical in digital forensics investigations because they provide access to transient, actionable evidence that disappears when a system is powered down. This type of analysis uncovers stealthy threats and real-time activities that traditional disk-based forensics often miss.
Forensic soundness is the foundation of any digital forensics investigation because it ensures that digital evidence remains reliable, trustworthy, and admissible in legal proceedings.
Ease of use and workflow efficiency directly impact the speed, accuracy, cost-effectiveness, and overall success of digital forensics investigations.
Defensible reporting is foundational to the credibility, transparency, and success of digital forensics investigations, ensuring that evidence is reliable, legally defensible, and understandable to all stakeholders.
Integration and compatibility is key to a digital forensics tool because they ensure the tool can work effectively within the broader investigative ecosystem, maximizing efficiency, flexibility, and investigative accuracy. Additionally, the ability to integrate with incident response (DFIR) helps minimize damage and reduce dwell time.
Scalability and performance eliminate bottlenecks and ensure that digital forensics tools remain effective and reliable as investigation demands grow in size, urgency, and complexity.
Why choose OpenText for Digital Forensics
From pioneering the industry’s earliest evidence acquisition methods to powering today’s enterprise-scale investigations, OpenText has played a foundational role in how digital evidence is collected, analyzed, and defended in court. Based on three decades of experience in digital forensics, thousands of agencies, corporations, and forensic professionals rely on OpenText every day because of the depth, scale, and legal-grade reliability that few other platforms can match.
OpenText digital forensics solutions are known for their court-validated imaging and analysis. They offer simple, artifact-based workflows in addition to providing deep evidence access with bit-level collection, even from damaged or encrypted drives. Because OpenText digital forensics solutions support remote forensic acquisition across large, distributed enterprise networks, digital forensic investigations can scale to thousands of endpoints with forensic-grade acquisition and deep disk-level visibility, not just log-based EDR-style data.
In addition to providing digital forensics software, OpenText delivers a line of digital forensic hardware such as write blockers, forensic imagers, and forensic duplicators designed to acquire forensic images of a suspect’s devices. These hardware tools integrate seamlessly with OpenText digital forensics software in order to provide investigative teams with a full-stack solution that reduces the need to mix vendors for acquisition and analysis.
OpenText digital forensics tools deliver extensive file system and artifact support, supporting a broad array of file systems and file carving capabilities. With the ability to handle legacy and obscure file systems common in criminal or insider threat investigations, OpenText digital forensics remains a strong choice for end-case file systems.
Whether for law enforcement, corporate investigations, or legal cases, OpenText gives professionals the precision, speed, and confidence they need when the stakes are high.
Power your investigation with OpenText
Discover how OpenText’s digital forensics solutions empower investigators to uncover critical evidence quickly, securely, and with full legal defensibility. Whether you’re managing complex enterprise investigations or conducting criminal casework, OpenText combines decades of expertise with cutting-edge technology to deliver reliable, scalable, and trusted forensics tools. Learn more about how OpenText can elevate your investigations and help you stay ahead in today’s evolving digital landscape by visiting.
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