Legal issues in digital forensics
As we saw in Chapter 1, a proper incident response involves key individuals from a variety of disciplines. This highlights one frequently held misconception: incident response is strictly a technological matter. One realm into which incident response falls heavily is the legal arena. There is a wide range of laws and regulations that directly impact an organization’s incident response capability, ranging from breach notification to privacy. These laws provide a framework for governments to prosecute offenders, as well as provide strict rules concerning topics such as how evidence is handled and presented in court.
Law and regulations
In the mid-1980s, as computer crime started to become more prevalent, jurisdictions began crafting laws to address ever-increasing instances of cybercrime. In the United States, for example, federal criminal law has specific statutes that deal directly with criminal activity when utilizing a computer, as follows...
