Write blocking
Once our evidence has been properly documented and collected, we can begin working on acquiring the actual digital evidence. I'll mention this a couple times in an effort to drive home the point, but the original evidence should only be used to create forensic copies or images, which will be discussed further on in this chapter and again in other chapters.
Working on the original evidence can, and usually will, modify the contents of the medium. For instance, booting a seized laptop into its native OS will allow data to be written to the hard drive and may also erase and modify the contents contained in RAM and the paging file.
To prevent this from happening, the use of a write blocker must be employed. Write blockers, as the name suggests, prevent data from being written to the evidence media. Write blockers can be found in both hardware and software types. If a hardware write blocker is not available, software versions are readily available as standalone...
