Digital Forensics Assignment: Data Collection and Acquisition Analysis

This homework assignment delves into the critical procedures of digital forensics, specifically focusing on data collection and acquisition. The student explores the initial steps in a digital investigation, emphasizing the importance of preserving, identifying, extracting, and documenting digital evidence for legal proceedings. The assignment highlights the significance of data collection from various digital devices, including computers, phones, and servers, and the subsequent acquisition of data to create forensic images. The student discusses the use of forensic tools like Autopsy and FTK Imager, and different acquisition types. The student recommends consulting IT professionals for encrypted devices. The assignment emphasizes the importance of these procedures for successful digital forensics investigations.

Running head: DIGITAL FORENSICS
DIGITAL FORENSICS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Discussions
Digital forensics is referred as the procedure of preserving, identifying, extracting and
documenting the evidence of computer that can be utilised by the court of law. It is an area of
science of discovering the evidences from various medias those are digital like computer
phone, server or a network (Farid 2018). It offers the team of forensics with the best tools and
techniques in order to solve then complex cases related to digital.
I have studied digital forensics thoroughly and have learnt that the first step of digital
forensics is collection and acquisition of data. I have learnt that collection of data is one of
the most important procedures of digital forensics. The investigators of forensics need to
collect the data from various digital devices at the scene of crime (Powell and Haynes 2020).
I have studied that evidence handling is one of the essential features of digital forensics. I
have learnt that collection of data means that gathering of devices and then duplicating the
stored information electronically for the objective of preserving the evidences those are
digital. I have learnt that the examiners collect various information from various devices such
as laptops, computers, tablets, email accounts and many more. I have seen that there are
certain devices those are encrypted (Soltani & Seno 2017). Therefore, I can provide a
recommendation to the investigators that they should consult an IT professional in order to
unlock these phones and retrieve the information present in the devices.
I have learnt that after the process of collection of data comes the acquisition of data. I
have studies that acquisition of data is the procedure of making an image of forensic from the
digital media such as hard drive, pen drive and many such devices stores these data. I have
learnt that making an image of the data and information is very essential in order to read the
data and the information (Wu et al 2017). I have also learnt that there are various tools those
are used in order to conduct the acquisition of data. The tools that I have learnt is Autopsy,

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FTK imager those are used in order to recover photos from the digital media and used in
order to conduct the imaging of the data that is acquired by the developing copies without
changing the evidences those are original. These help to study the information that is
retrieved from the devices carefully and successfully investigate the cases. I have also studied
about the various types of acquisition of data (Craiger 2018). The various types of acquiring
data include disk-to-disk, disk-to-image, logical disk-to-disk file and sparse copy of data. The
investigators using the various tools of acquisition of data do these.
I have concluded from these that collection and acquisition of data is one of the most
important procedures of digital forensics as this the first step while conducting the digital
forensics. I can recommend it to the investigators to use the tools in order to acquire the data
and do conduct the investigation carefully. If any of the complications takes place regarding
the digital devices, they must consult and IT professional.

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References
Craiger, J.P., 2018. Acquiring Volatile Data with FTK Imager.
Farid, H., 2018. Digital forensics in a post-truth age. Forensic science international, 289,
pp.268-269.
Powell, A. and Haynes, C., 2020. Social Media Data in Digital Forensics Investigations.
In Digital Forensic Education (pp. 281-303). Springer, Cham.
Soltani, S., & Seno, S. A. H. (2017, October). A survey on digital evidence collection and
analysis. In 2017 7th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering
(ICCKE) (pp. 247-253). IEEE.
Wu, S., Zhang, Y., Wang, X., Xiong, X. and Du, L., 2017. Forensic analysis of WeChat on
Android smartphones. Digital investigation, 21, pp.3-10.