Don’t be afraid to give us a call. We often hear, “You did such a fine job on the last case you worked for me. I’m not sure if you do this, but when I was posed with this new problem, I thought of Vestige.”
At Vestige, we’re up to the challenge! We love to not only help our clients with their difficult digital and cyber forensic issues, but thrive on it. We love to investigate and figure it out!
An organization that did not have a mechanism for capturing employee’s “time on the clock” but found themselves staring at the wrong end of a wage-labor lawsuit when they recognized that they had a need for knowing that information and desperately wished that they had a time clock in place. The suit alleged that the organization was improperly classifying employees as exempt.
This was an organization that did not have a time clock because of the belief that the affected employees were exempt.
This cyber forensic case came to us from the hospitality industry and involved individuals that were required to be in company-provided uniforms. This company had invested in an automated garment dispensary system that, in essence, functioned as a check-in/check-out locker room.
Upon arriving to work on their shift, the employee would approach this system, swipe their employee badge and enter their PIN on a touchpad. Similar to one of those automated racks in a dry cleaner, the system would retrieve a “locker” containing the employee’s personal uniform. They would remove the uniform from the locker, place their street clothes and other personal belongings into the locker, lock it up and return it to the carousel to return and repeat the entire process in reverse at the end of their shift.
The beauty, of course, is that being a technological endeavor in and of itself, this system kept a log of every garment’s check-in/check-out activity, complete with date and time stamps.
The client came to us because while the system had this great capability, unfortunately, only kept 30 days worth of records. This cyber forensic matter stretched back three or more years. Vestige’s knowledge of filesystems and operating systems allowed us to delve in, examine the workings of the device, determine how the data was stored, etc. This analysis led to the design of a custom routine that went through the entire hard-drive and identified and recovered nearly 1 million previously lost/deleted transactions, where a transaction represented the check-in or check-out of any of these garments, complete with proof that it was the individual employee (swipe card and PIN) and the essential date and time stamp.
The matter showed the true power of thinking outside the box and finding that unique source of digital evidence.
Contact Vestige today if you have an unusual matter to discuss. The initial consultation is free!
