In our post The Biggest Threat to Your Company May be within Your Company, we discussed how the biggest threat to your company may be within your company in terms of employee misconduct and fraud. Employee misconduct and fraud investigations are conducted for several reasons, including: sexual harassment, creating a hostile work environment for other employees, employee sabotage and intellectual property (IP) theft. IP theft can include ideas, inventions, and creative articulations, such as trade secrets and exclusive products to parts of motion pictures, music videos/music, and software source code, among other IP.
“Don’t reissue the computer unless the drive is removed and stored somewhere safe with a proper label on it.”
When a capital crime happens – such as robbery, kidnapping or murder – we all understand that preserving the crime scene is vitally important so that law enforcement can gather evidence such as fingerprints or DNA. Failure to preserve the crime scene can result in the inability for law enforcement to ever identify, pursue and convict suspects for the crime.
In the case of employee misconduct and fraud investigations, the sources of data associated with the investigation should be treated as a crime scene and must be preserved so that professionals can pursue the subject(s) of the investigation. With that in mind, it’s important to consider these best practices:
When you suspect potential employee misconduct or fraud, it is important to engage a digital forensics firm to perform an investigation to uncover pertinent evidence. Using specific and specialized software, the digital forensics firm can reveal digital evidence and a critical timeline through the various data sources to which the employee has (or had) access. Treat it as a crime scene and leave it to the professionals to process that crime scene effectively!
To schedule a free computer forensics consultation for your law firm or business, contact Forensic Discovery online or call us at 877-764-0920. Our certified computer forensics experts have helped thousands of clients throughout the country retrieve and preserve digital evidence from our offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Texas.
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