Research

In the world of digital forensics, we can envision data as belonging to two distinct categories. Those categories are either volatile, or non-volatile states of data (Mohanta, 2020). Volatile data includes random-access memory (RAM) that depends on a running power supply, whereas read-only memory (ROM) or data that is written to a hard disk is considered non-volatile. The readable contents of non-volatile data do not change upon power interruption. The industry standard open source tool I will explore this week to conduct memory forensics on traditional desktop endpoints has aptly been named Volatility.

It is difficult to ignore how the internet has now made it possible to cause harm in a digital environment (McGovern, 2018). According to Western interpretations of proper jurisprudence and social contract theory, individuals gain safety from legal protections that otherwise would not exist without government regulation, surveillance, intervention, and punishment. In the United States of America, the Constitution and Bill of Rights have served as ethical architecture and scaffolding in the physical world reasonably well since their ratification in 1788. However, due to the unrelenting nature of change, new technologies have since emerged that now question how legal standards such as the First Amendment and a Right to Privacy ought to apply in the modern world. Today, societies must respond and equip themselves with new laws and regulations that better anticipate cyber threats in-advance and proactively take steps to defend against criminal behavior in a challenging and constantly evolving online environment.

In today’s modern tech-centered business environment, corporations like Facebook, Google, and Amazon have collected extensive analytics of users’ online digital behavior in order to build, maintain, and increase their market caps. Public scandals such as Facebook’s voluntary involvement with Cambridge Analytica clearly reveal that businesses have enormous financial incentives to gather, store, and sell the personally identifiable information of end users. Historically, the legal guidelines surrounding the processing of users’ personal data has been lax. However, in response to this growing list of privacy concerns, European lawmakers passed and codified the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on May 25th, 2018.