Dont Trust the Computer; Dont Trust the Person Who Told you What he Found on the Computer
Despite all the sterling work put in by malware writers, scammers and whatnot to teach people not to trust computers, people still need to learn that reading or finding something on a computer doesn't automatically make it true. And this also applies to people whose job is find stuff on computers.
Digital forensics experts prone to bias, study shows (The Guardian)
Ian Walden, a professor of information and communications law at Queen Mary, University of London, said there was a tendency to believe the machine. "This study shows that we need to be careful about electronic evidence," Walden said. "Not only should we not always trust the machine, we can't always trust the person that interprets the machine."
[...] The study, [upcoming] , found that the examiners who had been led to believe the suspect might be innocent documented the fewest traces of evidence in the files, while those who knew of a potential motive identified the most traces.
With caching by the browser, hidden and invisible text on web pages, data retrieved by malware and probably many more ways, how can you show the user was even aware of something "suspicious" found on their computer. Even a small disk or SSD is far too big for one person to be able to know all the data on it.
Journal Reference:
Nina Sunde, Itiel E. Drorb. A hierarchy of expert performance (HEP) applied to digital forensics: Reliability and biasability in digital forensics decision making [open], Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation (DOI: 10.1016/j.fsidi.2021.301175)
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