Digital Forensics
I provide expert witness evidence in disputes that turn on the integrity, authenticity, or content of digital evidence. This includes forensic examination of mobile devices, messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, email systems, and electronic documents. My work involves the recovery, preservation, and analysis of digital evidence using industry-standard forensic tools and methodologies that produce results suitable for use in court proceedings.
What This Involves
Digital forensic examinations in a litigation context require a structured, defensible methodology. I use forensically sound imaging and extraction techniques to obtain data from mobile devices, computers, and cloud-based accounts. For mobile devices, this includes both logical and physical extractions using tools such as Cellebrite UFED, with the appropriate technique selected based on the device type, operating system version, and the nature of the data sought. The resulting data is then analysed within forensic platforms that maintain a complete audit trail, ensuring that findings can be verified and, where necessary, challenged.
A significant proportion of my digital forensics work involves the analysis of messaging application databases. Platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram store messages in SQLite databases on the device, and forensic examination of these databases can reveal information that is not visible in the application interface itself. This includes deleted messages (where not yet overwritten), edit histories, message timestamps at a precision beyond what the user sees, and metadata relating to forwarding, media attachments, and group membership changes. In my experience, the gap between what a screenshot of a conversation appears to show and what the underlying database reveals can be material to the issues in dispute.
I also undertake document forensics and evidence authentication work. This can involve examining document metadata to establish authorship, editing history, and creation dates, as well as identifying signs of tampering or fabrication. In cases involving email evidence, I analyse email headers, server logs, and transport metadata to verify the provenance of communications and to identify potential manipulation. Where electronic evidence is managed through eDiscovery platforms such as Relativity or Reveal, I am able to assist with the design and oversight of review workflows, including the use of technology-assisted review and predictive coding to manage large document sets efficiently.
Typical Instructions
- • Mobile device forensics and messaging database analysis (WhatsApp, Telegram)
- • Forensic email analysis, metadata examination, and authentication
- • Document forensics and evidence tampering detection
- • eDiscovery platform management and AI-assisted review (Relativity, Reveal)
- • Digital evidence preservation and chain-of-custody
- • OSINT (open-source intelligence) investigations
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