This course will serve as a comprehensive, practical guide to Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime investigations.

In this hyper-connected, ‘always online’ world that we now live in, almost any Crime can have a digital element – from a petty thief walking down the road with a smartphone in his pocket – to complex, multi-jurisdictional online frauds.

It is essential that today’s police investigators know how to leverage ‘Digital’ to their advantage effectively. What exhibits should my officers be seizing? – and what can I get back from different types of media? For example, what can I get back from a late-model iPhone versus a Windows laptop? Or is it worth attempting to extract data from a suspect’s Cloud-based accounts? These sessions will answer all these questions and much more – always with the aim of securing safe, admissible evidence – or useful and timely actionable intelligence.

The course will map the Digital Opportunity landscape for Investigators. In simple to follow, jargon-free language we will look at how an Investigator can obtain useful, admissible evidence from a suspect’s or witness’ digital devices. We will look at mobile phone forensics and computer forensics and discuss the difference between the two. We will also define and examine the data that can be recovered from loose media such as USB Flash drives, memory cards and backup drives. The recovery of a person’s Internet History will also be covered – ‘where’ they have been on the Internet either via a smartphone or a computer and what Google searches they have conducted. The course will also define and set out the procedures that we must follow to ensure that we do not undermine or taint the integrity of the digital evidence that we do recover.