Interpol defines digital forensics as the process of “...identifying, acquiring, processing, analyzing, and reporting” electronically stored data. It’s a discipline of forensics primarily used in the detection and prevention of cybersecurity threats. But it has other applications in today’s digital-first world.
Enterprise legal teams, legal firms, and private investigators often use digital forensics to investigate and gather evidence for civil litigation and criminal investigations. Digital forensics is also beneficial in compliance management, cyber risk mitigation, and data theft identification. And those are just a few examples of the commonly used applications.
This article focuses on how in-house legal teams and law firms use digital forensics in evidence collection. We’ll discuss the trends shaping the landscape, current challenges, and, generally, the future of digital forensics.
Emerging Trends Shaping Digital Forensics
As with many fields, heavy technological integration is defining the current landscape of digital forensics.
Here are three of the most prominent innovations transforming the sector:
1. Cloud forensics
Cloud computing is having its moment.
As of 2025, 2.3 billion people use personal cloud services; 60% of business data is stored on the cloud; and 92% of organizations use a mix of public and private cloud service providers for operational purposes.
While cloud computing has many benefits, it has its fair share of challenges too.
Widespread adoption has made organizations and individuals vulnerable to complex cybersecurity threats. Cybercriminals are exploiting rising cloud dependency to their benefit. Meanwhile, the widely distributed nature of cloud storage across multiple jurisdictions complicates compliance and risk management.
All that is to say, cloud computing is promising and volatile at the same time.
Its burgeoning popularity has triggered the emergence of cloud forensics. Cloud forensics focuses on:
- Incident detection
- Evidence preservation
- Preservation, analysis, and attribution of cloud data
- Mitigation
- Reporting
Cloud forensics help enterprise legal teams, lawyers, and even investigators to detect, manage, and mitigate the aforementioned cloud computing challenges.
2. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML)
There are few, if any, industries who have not been touched by the AI revolution—digital forensics is no exception.
AI and accessory technologies like Machine Learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and predictive analytics are simplifying digital forensic procedures.
With their help, handling large data sets (the foundational blocks of digital forensics) is becoming much faster, accurate, and cost-efficient. From proactive mitigation of data theft to reactive management of cyberattacks, the integration of AI in digital forensics promises to further automate the process for efficiency gains.
3. Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile device forensics
IoT and mobile device forensics are also gaining precedence, thanks to the increasingly interconnected nature of the digital world. As the use of different types of devices—including mobile devices, wearables, and smart home gadgets—increases, so does the scope of online evidence collection.
IoT and mobile device forensics are subsets of digital forensics. The branches work in tandem to drive identification, location, preservation, and presentation of digital evidence from diverse sources.
How Important Are Trends in Digital Forensics?
As the digital landscape evolves to become even more ubiquitous, cyber forensics will adapt to industry needs. Trends that currently dominate the industry can (and will) change in the future.
Following digital forensic trends can be useful, but it is important to keep in mind the relevancy of their applications. For example, for law enforcement teams and legal professionals, IoT and mobile device forensics may or may not have applications in external evidence collection for litigation purposes. Not all digital forensic trends have applications in all scenarios.
In this context, understanding common challenges in digital forensics is critical to choosing solutions that are effective in driving results and outcomes.
Current Challenges in Digital Forensics
For enterprise legal teams and law firms, the most common challenges of digital forensics fall into 3 major categories:
1. Managing large volumes of data
402.74 million terabytes of data are created every day. For internal recordkeeping, eDiscovery, and external evidence collection, having to locate, analyse, capture, manage, and preserve a substantial volume of data is a fact of life.
Using digital forensic techniques to locate evidence in even a small percentage of global data reserves is anything but easy. It requires advanced, cost-intensive data processing capabilities, and usually quite a bit of manual labor. Even in smaller cases, the feasibility of managing large volumes of data becomes a problem. Without assistance from digital forensic specialists, automated tools, or an IT team, many lawyers and legal teams do not have the technical capability or know-how to do so.
2. Ensuring data integrity and authenticity
The next major challenge in digital forensics is preserving data integrity.
While digital forensics deals with electronically stored information (ESI), ESI is prone to corruption and tampering. As you may have guessed, corrupted or tampered ESI evidence is not legally admissible. In fact, depending on the circumstances of the data corruption, your organization may be held responsible for the ‘destruction of evidence’ and face sanctions, fines, or adverse judgements.
Therefore, legal teams and investigators must always protect and preserve data authenticity, and chain of custody. If necessary, they must also implement retention schedules and legal holds to prevent accidental data loss or deletion.
These legal requirements add to the already complex landscape of digital forensics.
3. Navigating legal and ethical considerations
Most organizational ESI will be private data. And of course ESI stored on mobile devices, IoT hardware or personal social media, email, or cloud accounts is also held under the assumption that the data is private. Hence the very long privacy policies and terms and conditions that all users must read before use of these data-generating and storing platforms and devices.
As such, there are legal and ethical considerations relevant to obtaining sensitive or private information in digital forensics.
Data collection for digital forensics can come under specific privacy regulations, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Any investigation should also respect the concerned individual’s privacy rights.
Even when data is being collected for investigative purposes, legal teams need to ensure they have authorization (such as a warrant) if that information is not publicly accessible.
Teams must also ensure that they collect data that is actually relevant to the case. Attempts that go beyond what’s necessary may be considered overreach and can have legal implications.
Collecting too much irrelevant data will also lead to increased labor, as well as increased processing and analysis costs. This can lead to significant issues with resourcing investigations and litigation, as costs to process all the data soar.
Example: Capturing an entire Facebook profile may not seem like a lot of data, but if the person has been posting every day since 2007, that’s 18 years worth of content or ~6500 posts.
The first cost factor is the labour required to manually screenshot 6500 posts—with all associated metadata and ensuring chain of custody—before they disappear.
The second cost factor is the labour required to sort through the capture and figure out what is actually relevant to the case. Manually reviewing 6500+ posts takes a very long time, and can end up being extremely expensive.
Regardless of the purpose of the investigation (IP and copyright infringement, cyber fraud, or online harassment, to name a few), legal and ethical considerations must be prioritized in digital evidence collection, not only to avoid having evidence challenged in court, but to keep litigation costs under control.
Understanding External Digital Evidence Collection
So, what’s the standard operating procedure for digital evidence collection?
1. Collect evidence immediately
ESI is mutable. Social media posts, website content, messaging apps, and enterprise-level tools all contain critical information that may become digital evidence.
Unlike physical records, ESI can be changed, deleted, or altered at any moment. That means teams must act quickly when collecting ESI or essential evidence crucial to their investigation could disappear.
2. Ensure data authenticity and integrity with hash values
Even the timely capture of digital evidence is insufficient without proof of data integrity and authenticity.
For use in court you must ensure the collected data is authentic and untampered with; otherwise, it may not be legally admissible. Screenshots are especially susceptible to challenges of authenticity in court, as they are easily manipulated with the help of photo editing software.
One of the best ways to ensure authenticity is to employ the use of hash values in your digital evidence collection. Hash values are unique digital footprints that prove data has not been tampered with. Even minor changes to the original data change the hash value, which helps to establish ESI as authentic.
In addition to applying hash values to collected evidence, making sure to capture metadata and using digital signatures also contributes to collecting forensically sound, defensible evidence.
3. Ensure chain of custody
Establishing a clear chain of custody is mandatory for defensibility in litigation.
To ensure chain of custody, you must document every step of acquiring, processing, and analyzing digital evidence, including who, when, where, and how the data was processed. Measures taken to ensure authenticity (like SHA-256 hashing), must also be documented and verified.
4. Source specialized digital evidence collection tools
Having the right tools that collect, preserve, and present data in admissible, legally-defensible formats is key to success in litigation.
The Role of Digital Evidence Collection Tools in Modern Forensics
Without the right digital evidence collection tools, teams can easily:
- let crucial evidence slip away before it is captured
- become overrun with data processing time and costs
- have their hard-won evidence thrown out of court for a breach in the chain of custody or inability to prove authenticity.
Sourcing an automated digital evidence collection tool like WebPreserver can significantly reduce manual labor and data capture costs, while also ensuring your case is backed up by verifiable, authentic evidence that will stand up in court.
In these ways, digital evidence collection tools are essential to digital forensics, and will continue to be well into the future as our digital world expands.
What is WebPreserver and how does it work?
WebPreserver allows you to capture any evidence you can find online on third-party sites, in just two-clicks.
With the browser-based plug in you can quickly automate the capture and preservation of evidence as soon as you find it. Any evidence captured with WebPreserver is digitally signed and hashed with SHA-256, ensuring chain of custody.
WebPreserver helps investigative and legal teams:
- Collect and preserve anything from embedded videos, Facebook Reels, Instagram Stories, and YouTube Shorts to webpage content in original formatting and context.
- Guarantee evidence has not been tampered with by storing it with SHA-256 hash values.
- Export digital evidence in legally-admissible formats like OCR PDF, MHTML, or ISO standard WARC files.
WebPreserver makes digital evidence collection quick, easy, and legally-defensible.
Learn more about WebPreserver today.
