Leveraging digital forensics to advance employee misconduct investigations
Employee misconduct can pose serious financial, operational, and reputational risks to enterprise organizations. Bullying, sexual harassment, gambling, accessing inappropriate content, and similar misconduct costs U.S. companies up to $300 billion a year according to Work Shield. The 2024 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ “Report to the Nations” estimates occupational fraud alone leads to annual losses of more than $3 trillion globally.
With the rise of remote work and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, sensitive data is increasingly accessible on personal and off-network devices—and the potential for serious security breaches and intellectual property theft grows. Protecting employees, data, and organizational integrity has become progressively more complex, requiring an advanced, integrated approach.
The critical elements of an employee misconduct investigation
Employee misconduct investigations require an approach that ensures efficiency, accuracy, compliance, and legal defensibility. While every organization’s specific policies will be unique, three elements are critical to any investigation:
- Data acquisition: First, it is necessary to identify where evidence may exist, including employee devices, cloud accounts, or organizational assets, and access that evidence. Investigative software can automate and standardize data collection, while ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, preserving context, and maintaining data integrity.
- Data analysis: Once data is extracted, it is key to correlate the information across multiple devices and platforms to establish what happened. Applying AI-driven analysis, filters, and activity timelines can quickly identify relevant evidence. Tools that validate the authenticity of images and videos help ensure that the data has not been manipulated.
- Collaboration and review: Enabling collaboration across all relevant stakeholders is crucial for any investigation, as is clear and organized reporting of the findings that aligns with internal policies, privacy standards, and legal requirements.
By combining a formal process, appropriate investigative tools, and strict compliance practices, organizations can efficiently conduct thorough employee misconduct investigations with confidence.
Data acquisition
Accessing data on employee mobile devices
Maintaining security, integrity, and privacy of evidence during employee misconduct investigations is critical. Magnet Verakey is a tool that enables organizations to capture mobile device data, with proper consent, preserving evidence integrity while complying with privacy regulations and internal policies.
Verakey provides both logical extraction and Full File System (FFS) extraction from iOS and Android devices—including encrypted, deleted, and hidden data. Category-based targeting enables the selective extraction of only relevant communications, minimizing exposure of personal data. All evidence is encrypted to prevent unauthorized access or data breaches. Magnet Verakey ensures mobile evidence remains secure, verifiable, defensible, and ready for use in internal investigations.
Managing remote data collection
Internal investigations into misconduct such as IP theft, policy violations, or inappropriate content often require collecting and managing data from multiple remote systems or information stored on cloud-based services. Magnet Nexus provides a centralized, SaaS-based platform that can acquire data from widely used platforms such as Microsoft 365, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, and from multiple devices simultaneously, reducing investigation timelines.
Category extractions in Magnet Verakey and targeted locations in Magnet Nexus allow investigators to acquire only the data that is relevant while excluding personal or nonessential data. This is especially valuable in BYOD or shared device scenarios, ensuring compliance with privacy policies and regulatory standards.
This approach minimizes disruption to daily business operations and respects data privacy while accelerating the path to resolution. Encrypted data handling, detailed audit trails, and secure storage protocols help organizations mitigate legal risk, safeguard sensitive information, and uphold the integrity of internal investigations.
Data analysis
Employee misconduct investigations demand a robust platform capable of efficiently analyzing terabytes of data from a wide variety of sources. Magnet Axiom Cyber enables enterprise organizations to conduct these investigations efficiently, securely, and defensibly.
Axiom Cyber allows investigators to remotely collect and analyze data from Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints, even when devices are offline or geographically dispersed and can examine evidence from cloud services and IoT systems – providing an enterprise-wide view of employee activity. Timeline reconstruction, connections mapping, AI-assisted filtering, and advanced rulesets enable investigators to quickly identify relevant evidence, detect patterns of misconduct, and accurately reconstruct events. Chain-of-custody protocols, role-based access controls, and immutable audit logs ensure all collected evidence is verifiable and legally defensible.
Establishing timelines and patterns of behavior
Once suspicious content or actions are identified, the next phase is to understand context—what occurred, when it occurred, and how it unfolded. Magnet Axiom Cyber’s advanced Timelines capability consolidates data sources such as system logs, communications, and media activity into a clear chronological view. This allows investigators to:
- Determine whether misconduct was intentional and repeated
- Link actions to specific organizational systems, assets, or time periods
- Identify escalation or progression of unwanted behavior
Visualizing behavioral patterns is especially valuable when communicating findings to stakeholders who do not have technical expertise. These insights provide clarity behind the investigative conclusion, not just evidence of noncompliance.
Data is coming from different places, whether it’s operating systems, whether it’s by application or type of device. Axiom Cyber is pulling that all together in a magical way.“
— Julie Lewis, President, CEO & Founder, Digital Mountain
Mapping interactions and file movement
Employee misconduct may involve unauthorized sharing of sensitive data, circulating offensive content, or distributing malware. The Connections feature in Magnet Axiom Cyber automates the complex task of correlating relationships between artifacts, devices, users, and systems and can show:
- How a file originated, moved, and propagated across a network
- Who received or accessed shared content
- Relationships between individuals and the digital assets they interacted with
This level of attribution is critical in situations where multiple people have access to the same device or communication channel.
Verifying the authenticity of digital media
One of the biggest challenges facing investigators today is the proliferation of altered, faked, or manipulated data. Verifying the authenticity of images and video has become a critical element of any investigation. Magnet Verify is an advanced forensic tool which indicates whether images and videos have been altered or manipulated, validating the authenticity and integrity of media files.
Investigators can examine metadata, file structures, and timestamps to identify anomalies, trace file origins, and detect synthetic media or AI-generated content. Comprehensive reports document the validation process, enabling teams to make informed decisions based on verified, explainable evidence.
AI-enhanced tools for internal investigations
Internal investigations can involve vast volumes of information dispersed across endpoints, cloud platforms, collaboration tools, and messaging channels. Manual review of this data is time-consuming and prone to human error.
AI-enhanced tools can examine digital evidence from mobile, cloud, and computer sources to quickly surface relevant evidence and flag potential indicators of misconduct, while ensuring investigators always make the final call. Axiom Cyber allows you to automatically detect and categorize potential pictures of illicit content such as drugs, weapons, or hate symbols, and chats containing sexual conversations. Cyber also offers optical character recognition (OCR) and is optimized for extracting text from PDFs, scanned documents, and other images that may be included in emails.
The tagging capabilities in Cyber can also help you reduce the amount of “noise” you have to review with the picture classifier by finding system icons and graphics within datasets. Once they’re identified, these items can then be tagged and filtered out. In an internal test with a real dataset, Magnet Forensics reduced the number of media items for review by ~50%.
Integrating AI-enhanced tools allows organizations to streamline internal investigations, reduce manual effort, and focus on interpreting verified, high-priority evidence. The result is a faster, more accurate, and fully defensible investigative process that supports organizational integrity and protects employee rights.
Collaboration and review
Internal employee misconduct investigations often require coordination among multiple stakeholders such as human resources, legal, compliance, and IT departments. Magnet Review provides a secure, centralized, web-based environment designed to simplify evidence review and collaboration.
Stakeholders can review data without needing specialized forensic tools or local data copies, reducing security risks and preserving data integrity. Review supports role-based access controls, allowing investigators to assign tailored permissions to individual participants. This ensures sensitive or irrelevant materials remain restricted while authorized individuals can review and comment on evidence relevant to their role. Integrated commenting and tagging streamlines communication across departments, helping teams reach conclusions faster while maintaining a full audit trail for compliance.
Key takeaways
Conducting an effective, efficient, and compliant employee misconduct investigation requires a structured digital forensics approach across acquisition, analysis, collaboration, and reporting.
- Acquisition: Quickly and securely gather digital evidence from employee devices while maintaining data integrity from the moment of collection.
- Analysis: Streamline investigative steps and reduce manual effort while confirming authenticity.
- Collaboration and reporting: Enable HR, legal, and IT teams to examine evidence thoroughly and generate reports that meet legal and regulatory standards.
Learn more about how Magnet Forensics can support your employee misconduct investigations, while protecting sensitive data and organizational integrity. Contact us today and see how our solutions will give you an Investigative Edge.