What is Website Preservation?
Gathering, and properly preserving, evidence in a digital world is more than just making print outs. What is visible on a website one day, may be gone the next. When your court case could hinge on evidence present online, having accurate, defensible, and properly preserved evidence is crucial.
When evidence is present on a website - any website - that you want to use in court, it’s important to have a copy of that evidence in a form that can be verified to be an accurate representation of the original data. While you can print physical images of the site, if the opposing counsel contests it, you may find all your hard work and important evidence is thrown out. Digital Forensics Corp’s Website Preservation services offer online evidence preservation by a neutral 3rd party that can include signed certification stating the authenticity of the evidence.
How Does It Work?
We utilize specially designed tools that look at a given website and collect the data from that website, recreating it in its entirety. This data can then be archived in a variety of ways, making it a static, irrefutable piece of evidence that you can later use in court. No matter what happens on the website between now and the time you need the evidence, you will still have access to the evidence that is most important to you.
When we collect and preserve a website for you, you don’t just get simple screenshots of the page. The data we gather allows us to rebuild the webpage for you - and it this same data can be used to rebuild the webpage by other parties at a later date, if needed. The data we collect includes the rebuilt page, the HTML source codes, and even MD5 hash data that can be used to verify the content.
What Kind of Websites Can You Preserve?
If it is online, we can most likely preserve it for you. Social networking sites, business sites, blog sites, personal sites - all of these can be preserved. Preservation can be done quickly, and can even start with the page(s) on the site that are most relevant to your case - before the site content can be changed or removed. We can even scan a site, only documenting pages that contain certain keywords to ensure that you get the evidence you need.
Don’t wait until the evidence you need has been removed or changed. Call us today and let us document the data that is most important to your case immediately.
