It can be hard to set aside time from your busy schedule for training and skill development. You know it’s incredibly beneficial to your career and your investigations, but you also want to make sure that you’re getting maximum impact for your time.
Chat and messaging data now sit at the center of many internal investigations, HR matters, and eDiscovery workflows. Whether the source is Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, iMessage, or any other modern communication platform, the volume and density of conversations can quickly overwhelm reviewers if it isn’t presented in a clean, structured way.
Modern digital investigations need to move fast. Analysts are often forced to collect too much, too little, or the wrong data simply because forensic tools don’t give them enough control. Overcollection slows analysis. Under collection increases risk.
The same impulse that kept me running cases late into the evening as a digital forensics examiner is the one that now drives me to help agencies articulate their needs, justify investments in automation, and demonstrate the outcomes that funding can unlock.
The pace of change in mobile technology is relentless, and with each new mobile OS release, digital investigators face fresh challenges in preserving and accessing vital evidence. The recent introduction of reboot timers in mobile operating systems has become an urgent race against time.
The UK government’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill marks one of the most significant updates to the UK’s national cyber legislation in years. It reflects the reality that cyberattacks are now an operational certainty, and organizations, especially those supporting critical services, must be able to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents far more quickly and transparently than before.
Hiberfil.sys is one of those Windows artifacts every examiner should know about. It can contain a near-complete capture of system memory but is also tricky to collect and parse.
Authored by Doug Metz Originally published in the November 2025 issue of Magnet Unlocked. Want to be the first to see new content? Sign up for our monthly newsletter, Magnet Unlocked. In many corporate environments, cybersecurity and DFIR still operate in separate lanes: SOC = Detection & containmentDFIR = Evidence & root cause That separation made … Continued
After the second episode of Legal Unpacked, a question came in that mirrors a frequent issue raised in court: A judge asks, “You obtained data from an application on the device, and from the cloud provider for data for the same account stored remotely. Can you explain to the court why the two sets of data don’t match?” The underlying assumption is that device data and cloud data should align. In reality, they are fundamentally different, and misunderstanding that distinction risks missing potential evidence.
Magnet User Summit 2026 is getting closer, and we’re excited to share this year’s presentation catalog! We’ve got an incredible collection of presenters lined up ready to deliver sessions that will educate, empower, and inspire everyone joining us in Nashville on April 20-22. That includes insights from both the private sector and law enforcement about AI-driven solutions, navigating the latest mobile forensics challenges, cybersecurity, media authentication, reducing the demands of your investigations in the lab and so much more.
