Journal 14: Digital Forensics and Social Sciences

Journal 14: Digital Forensics and Social Sciences

Gary Hensley

8/16/26

The field of digital forensics is one of many different fields in the cybersecurity space. After watching the video of Davin Teo talking about his career in Digital Forensics, he uses many tools for collecting, analyzing, and reporting that can be used in investigations. It is connected to the social sciences because the field investigates people and patterns in the data they collect.

The speaker discussed his journey to this career, and as he put it, he kinda fell into it. He started out in accounting and had an opportunity to move to digital forensics. He stated that he enjoyed working with computers and solving problems. One way he explained what his job entails was by going over a case he worked on. The case involved searching a company's network to identify the person who caused the problem. He found that some vertical networks hosted torrent sites. It shows that it is not just data but stories of people you are collecting. Everything we do online leaves fingerprints behind. As the speaker stated, they can go in and review what you have been doing, but they can also review deleted information to get a better idea of what is going on. Understanding human behavior helps a digital forensics professional know what to look for. Another point that stood out was how people see the job from the world of TV series like CSI, and he touched on the fact that it is not magical and it is many days of collecting and studying. One client that he helped out was an art dealer who was about to lose a lot of money over some messages that got deleted. So there is a lot of human aspects to the job.

The speaker's journey to digital forensics was not a straight path, but he got into the career and enjoys the problem solving. This field definitely ties to the social sciences due to its links to human behavior and social aspects.

References

TEDx Talks. (2014). Digital Forensics | Davin Teo | TEDxHongKongSalon [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf-JnQfAEew