Susan Bradley writes:
My Father was an auditor. He used to lug home this large calculators that were heavy and impressive. When I started work at Tamiyasu, it was right at the start of the Personal computer revolution. Now we have the equivalent in our smart phones. The amount of content and data that are on these devices we now slide into our pockets or purses is staggering.
Computers hold data. And sometimes employees do things with that data they aren’t supposed to do. But more often than not a trail is left so that we can look and see – and prove – that someone did something. Computer forensics is the name for this study and investigation of computers. You’ve heard and probably seen reports that computers don’t always erase the data when you tell them to. The reality of a computer is that it’s like a large electronic file cabinet. When you erase a file on it, in reality all you are doing is erasing the table of contents so that the system can’t easily find the data. That doesn’t mean that it’s now been erased off the system entirely. Unless you save back over the top, or use technology to wipe the hard drive, chances are that the file is still there, intact, and easily recoverable.