Meet compliance needs with category extractions in Magnet Verakey
In today’s digital investigations, smartphones hold vast amounts of potentially critical insights. For many of us, our smartphone has become central to our daily lives. On one device there can be tens to hundreds of gigabytes of data stored as communications, apps, games, photos, videos, music, and documents. It makes sense that 65.5% of corporate DFIR professionals indicated that the number of mobile devices in investigations is increasing in this year’s State of Enterprise DFIR report.
That’s why efficiency, accuracy, and protecting data privacy is critical when performing mobile investigations. For forensic examiners, the ability to filter through massive datasets and extract only what is relevant to a case is invaluable.
This is where focused, precise data extraction comes into play, and category extractions in Magnet Verakey takes this capability to the next level for mobile forensic investigations.
(Category-based extractions are available in Magnet Greykey as well. In this blog, we’re focusing on mobile forensics for the purpose of internal or corporate investigations, civil lawsuits, and incident response using Verakey.)
The challenge of data overload
The sheer volume of data on today’s smartphones poses a significant challenge for forensic examiners. Each smartphone could contain thousands of messages, countless images and videos, and a wealth of information from various applications. Sifting through this data to find pertinent evidence can be time consuming, resource intensive, and may even delay crucial case outcomes. This approach also introduces risks to privacy, as irrelevant information may be inadvertently included in forensic extractions.
For eDiscovery purposes, internal investigations, phishing, business email compromise, and compliance teams alike, ensuring only relevant data is collected is increasingly critical.
What is a “category extraction”?
With category extractions in Verakey you can select and collect only specific categories of mobile data, such as messages, message attachments, mail, and locations. Instead of performing a full file system extraction, this targeted approach offers several benefits and is especially useful when time is limited or where privacy and regulatory concerns require limiting the scope of data collection.
You can use it to quickly extract intelligence from a device to point you in the right direction, or to build a case for collecting a full file system extraction.
In addition to the categories noted above, the Communications and Multimedia categories have optional subcategories enabling you to be even more targeted with your collection. For example, the Communications category breaks down the data available to SMS, mail, voicemail, and call history.
To further refine your dataset, you can filter by a date range such as 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, and a custom range.
Benefits of category extractions in Magnet Verakey
1. Compliance with privacy and data protection regulations
- Privacy and data protection regulations vary from country to country. For example, data privacy regulations—like GDPR—impose strict requirements on data handling, including the collection, processing, and sharing of personal information. Over-collection can expose organizations to compliance risks, including penalties for unnecessarily exposing personal data.
- Verakey is designed for consent-based mobile investigations. With the addition of category extractions, we’re helping you to stay within regulatory boundaries, reducing the risk of capturing and exposing sensitive data. This is especially valuable for organizations that operate globally, where data privacy laws can vary significantly.
2. Increased efficiency and speed
- While a full file system extraction offers you the most complete picture and preservation of a mobile device, it can take hours to extract and process due to the sheer size of the dataset.
- When only specific data types are of interest or permitted for collection, category extractions reduce the overall volume of data collected, which can significantly cut extraction and processing times. This streamlined collection lets investigative teams spend less time sifting through irrelevant data and more time on key insights.
- Category extractions speed up the time to actionable insights, which can be crucial in fast-moving cases like incident response, insider threats, or IP theft.
- Bonus: Verakey provides you with an anticipated extraction time for each data type so you can estimate how long the collection will take if you’re in an especially tight time crunch!
3. Enhance investigative precision, align with proportionality standards
- With category
- In addition, discovery is limited to non-privileged material. Combine this approach to mobile data extraction and the ability to remove privileged material from analysis in Axiom Cyber and you have a powerful solution for forensic data collection and analysis in support of legal proceedings.
4. Reduce data storage costs
- Data volume directly impacts costs in eDiscovery. Every additional gigabyte of data collected and processed results in increased expenses for storage, review, and analysis. By focusing only on specific, relevant data categories, legal teams can drastically reduce the amount of data processed, significantly cutting costs.
5. More accessible for non-technical stakeholders
- Category extractions allow a higher degree of accessibility and effectiveness across different stakeholders—especially those who may not be deeply technical—by focusing only on what’s needed without overwhelming them with an entire file system extraction. (While Verakey and Axiom Cyber provide powerful forensic collection, processing, and analysis capabilities, sharing the data with non-technical stakeholders is best achieved using Magnet Review.)
Ready to see Verakey in action? Check out how easy it is to perform category-based extractions in this interactive demo:
Magnet Verakey: Advanced consent-based access of mobile data
As digital forensics approaches and technology continue to evolve, solutions that support targeted collections like Magnet Verakey will play an essential role in making your job easier and protecting organizations, employees, and clients from legal risk.
Additional resources
- Watch the on-demand webinar “Data uncovered: Revealing truths in eDiscovery with Magnet Forensics solutions” for insights and real-world use cases showing how Magnet Forensics solutions, like Verakey, support eDiscovery
- See how Aperture grew client engagement by 25% with Magnet Forensics solutions, including Verakey
- Learn more and request a personalized demo of Magnet Verakey from one of our forensics experts