Virginia Based Technology Company Simplifies Electronic Data Chain of Custody with Newly Developed Hard Disk Drive
"Maintaining Evidence in our digitized world".
- (1888PressRelease) December 18, 2014 - Reston, VA - We hear a lot about maintaining the chain of custody of collected digital evidence for fair and legal prosecution in a court of law. What exactly is it? And how does it impact our judicial proceedings, costs, and our ability to comply with the requirements in today's litigious workplace?
Wikipedia has a definition. "Chain of Custody (CoC) in legal contexts refers to the chronological documentation or paper trail, showing the seizure, custody, control, transfer, analysis and disposition of physical or electronic evidence."
The Legal definition is "the movement and location of physical or electronic evidence from the time it is obtained until the time it is presented to court".
We live in a digital world, and so does the criminal element. When it comes to collecting, processing, disseminating, and storing digital evidence, the processes and procedures used for a hundred years will no longer do. Whether from a suspected terrorist Web site, a surveillance video, the audio/video record of a suspect's interrogation or a statement provided by a whistle blower, informant, or a concerned citizen, the evidence consists of bits of magnetic or electronic fields that are easy to modify or delete without detection. Although the use of digital technology has simplified the distribution of intelligence, the ease with which such information can be manipulated, or at least be alleged to have been manipulated, is proving problematic in providing an auditable secure chain of custody and thus for use as evidence. It is simply not practical to store every computer or hard drive in a vault and use the traditional forms of access control and signature cards for sign in and sign out. Every time someone signs out a computer or hard drive to examine it, there is one more opportunity to alter the record-or at least that is what any defense attorney would argue.
How do you best maintain chain of custody when any lost, corrupted or modified data collected "breaks the chain"? You must preserve evidence from the time it is collected to the time it is presented to court.
All collected original evidence necessitates protection against tampering, alteration, and accidents (unintended alterations) in the analysis process. Evidence needs to be authenticated, and whoever collects the evidence is required to testify that the information is what it is purported to be, and with large volumes of data that begins to become very difficult to prove. Just accessing the data to verify the content or make copies can in itself cause corruption to the original. If the evidence cannot be authenticated, it is usually inadmissible in court. Just the steps required are so complex and involved it is very easy to have evidentiary problems in court.
So how can you best protect the evidence? Chain of custody for physical items was normally an "evidence locker" with trained evidence custodians. For digitized computer protection, it can be a nightmare requiring experts as shown above. The processes are very labor intensive and wrought with points of failure due to the manual "hand off, sign off" methodology that is still part of the electronic data evidence process that exists today.
Fortunately, and thanks to GreenTec-USA, technology today in the digitized data arena has reached the level where a true Read-Only, high speed, high density WORM (Write Once Read Many) disk drive that protects data from accidental or intentional modification, alteration, reformatting or deletion is a reality. It is called a "WORMdisk". Enforcement is at the physical disk level so your data stays with the WORMdisk wherever it goes, therefore providing an immutable "chain of custody." An additional advantage to using the WORMdiskÔ is that no expensive appliance is needed, and there is added cyber security protection because the data cannot be modified or deleted. WORMdisksÔ are simple to use, scalable, support Windows, Linux, OS X and standard IT equipment and infrastructure in both standalone and rackmount configurations. Almost all of the labor and costs necessary to prove the evidence's validity are gone forever. Prices for the WORMdisks are in the range of enterprise hard drives that are used on today's standard computers and servers.
So how do you best protect your data?
Insure that you have the latest and most state-of-the-art technology that is out there!!!
About GreenTec-USA
GreenTec-USA is a security technology company and a pioneer in data center modularization and optimization for servers, storage, video and secure document storage. The holder of numerous patents and industry firsts, GreenTec has over 30 years in the supercomputing industry for both classified and unclassified Government agencies. Their advanced analysis, design and engineering is focused on delivering secure, high performance, low energy compute, storage and HD/SD video solutions at significant cost and energy savings.
If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with GreenTec-USA, please contact Bob Waligunda at (703) 391-6325, ext.: 2005 or email at bwaligunda ( @ ) greentec-usa dot com
Press Contact:
Bob Waligunda
GreenTec-USA
11720 Sunrise Valley Dr., Reston, VA 20191, USA
703 391-6325
http://www.greentec-usa.com
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