Digital forensic tools and techniques
CCL-Forensics is committed to staying at the forefront of the digital forensics industry. To achieve this, the company employs a number of full-time dedicated research and development analysts to devise and validate new forensically-sound tools and internal systems to ensure maximum productivity.
As technology continues to advance, the challenges facing digital forensic analysts become more and more complex. But here at CCL-Forensics, we believe that this offers a major opportunity in the world of digital evidence, as devices are capable of holding a much larger quantity of data. "Standard" forensic tools may not extract this data, but CCL-Forensics is constantly developing more and better forensic tools to enable its analysts to extract this potentially valuable evidence.
This page will be regularly updated with details of our R&D advancements, showcasing the tools and techniques we can use to extract more data from more devices in our secure forensic laboratories.
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YouTube video channel
We have produced a number of introductory videos to the tools and techniques developed by our in-house Research and Development department.
These tools and techniques are designed to maximise evidential opportunities, and extract more data from more devices. Please feel free to browse the videos in our Youtube channel below, and if you have any queries, please contact us on 01789 261200 or email info@ccl-forensics.com
March 2011: Evidence from web analytic cookies
Research analysts at CCL-Forensics have forensically recovered vital internet history data from ‘cookies’ stored within a smartphone, which would not have been retrieved and interpreted using ‘standard’ forensic tools.
In particular, cookies placed by the Google Analytics service yielded valuable evidence. Using a number of internally-developed tools, the research and development team retrieved valuable data from more than 1000 cookies.
The data contains information about the domain which placed the cookies, and the ‘value’ of the cookie itself. This ‘value,’ for cookies placed by Google Analytics, can yield timestamps, number of visits and crucially, referral information. This means that the digital analyst can see details not only about the site which had been visited, but how the user got there. Where the user arrived at the site via a search engine, this can also include the search terms which led them to that page; this data may not exist anywhere else on the phone.
With this evidence parsed, CCL-Forensics was able to produce a timeline for the law enforcement agency in question, demonstrating with much greater clarity the suspect’s internet usage – and crucially, the evidence of intent showing how the page was arrived at.
For more information about this technique, or to discuss how it could be relevant in your current case, please call CCL-Forensics on 01789 261200 or email us
