Data Handling Best Practices
You are updating data handling guidance to help employees recognize different types of regulated data. What examples could you add to help identify healthcare data?
Click to show answer
Personal healthcare data is medical records, insurance forms, hospital/laboratory test results, and so on. Healthcare information is also present in de-identified or anonymized data sets.
An employee has a private license for a graphics editing application that was bundled with the purchase of a digital camera. The employee needs to use this temporarily for a project and installs it on her computer at work. Is this a valid use of the license?
Click to show answer
No. The license is likely to permit installation to only one computer at a time. It might or might not prohibit commercial use, but regardless of the license terms, any installation of software must be managed by the IT department.
Why are the actions of a first responder critical in the context of a forensic investigation?
Click to show answer
Digital evidence is difficult to capture in a form that demonstrates that it has not been tampered with. Documentation of the scene and proper procedures are crucial.
What does chain-of-custody documentation prove?
Click to show answer
Who has had access to evidence collected from a crime scene and where and how it has been stored.
Your organization is donating workstations to a local college. The workstations have a mix of HDD and SSD fixed disks. There is a proposal to use a Windows boot disk to delete the partition information for each disk. What factors must be considered before proceeding with this method?
Click to show answer
Using standard formatting tools will leave data remnants that could be recovered in some circumstances. This might not be considered high risk, but it would be safer to use a vendor low-level format tool with support for Secure Erase or Crypto Erase.