Question: what kind of stuff do you do to help police with your work?

Holly Duns answered on 29 Sep 2020:

A large part of my work is research based so we look at methods to gather data from suspect devices that the police don’t have a method for or don’t have time to understand. A couple of examples of how this works:

All police forces conducting any forensics work also have to have be accredited in order to take their evidence to court and be confident in their process, tools and methods used to achieve the result they did. Helping police forces achieve their accreditation is something I work on through devising a standard process for investigations on certain devices. However, this is extremely challenging as every case is different, there are thousands of different devices available that contain data and every device can been used in a different way by each user.

Additionally, as i mentioned, there are thousands of different digital devices people use today. If you imagine a fully digitalised home/crime scene with Wi-Fi routers, amazon alexa, smart watches, a ring door bell, lights and sensors, computers, mobile phones, SD cards, USB sticks, smart locks and so many more. Each and every one of these devices contains user data i.e. data that has only been placed there as a result of user interaction. Therefore, each device could contribute to figuring out what happened at that crime scene, however if the police were to seize every piece of evidence from every crime scene they wouldnt have space to store it all. So what we do is identify the devices that record the most valuable data that would contribute to a case as well as the best method to acquire the data from each device and provide the police with that information, speeding up their investigation process and reducing their backlog of devices.