Since anyone can put anything they want on their servers, it seems like a lot of evidence could be thrown out in court cases if access to that information is not strictly monitored and audited to make sure the owners aren’t removing or adding data.
Does anyone know of industry-standard practices to ensure that data on servers is not being manipulated in a way to protect or harm users?
The data gets cloned to an image first, that image is then whats gets used as evidence.
Thanks.
That seems like it would prevent tampering after a certain point, but it doesn’t verify that the data hasn’t been maliciously altered before the image is created.
Speaking for the United States, any document or other exhibit is only admitted into evidence when a witness gets on the stand and testifies under oath as to what the document is. So if someone wants a court to believe that, say, a computer log is authentic, they have to produce a witness to testify about the authenticity. This is where anti tampering measures can be discussed, if relevant.
That witness is then subject to cross examination, which can reveal any holes or gaps. Cross examination can also be used to impeach the credibility of the witness themself.
Once an exhibit is admitted into evidence, the trier of fact, either a judge or jury, will assign a credibility level to it based on the sum total of evidence presented and their own common sense.
A proper forensic analysis would take into account things like modification times and other factors that could be used to determine if there was alterations.
Its the same with physical documents, a company can get a legal order to not shred documents and keep everything pertaining to a given subject, if they internally ignore it and shred documents anyway, they might get away with it, but its a pretty big risk for a company to take.
I don’t know about it being a big risk, it really depends.
Look at Enron - they shredded (I believe literally) tons of documents.
There’s a penalty for destroying such things, but you’d really have to prove what it was for the worst penalties. Better in Enron’ s perspective to prevent the bigger issue, and shred the evidence that would certainly convict their C-suite.
Yeah for large corporations like Enron and their C-suites the rules are a bit different, but if its not some rich corpo exec then there are usually consequences. They might get away with the original crime but charged instead with obstructing or worse, they might still be convicted on the first thing plus an obstruction charge.