What does IT forensics cover?

IT forensics is the forensic examination of enterprise technology infrastructure, including physical and virtual servers, storage area networks, backup systems, cloud platforms, directory services, email systems, databases, and network devices. GDF's IT forensics practice applies court-admissible methodology to enterprise infrastructure, producing findings that attorneys can rely on for litigation, regulatory proceedings, and corporate inquiries.

How is server forensic analysis different from workstation analysis?

Server environments present unique forensic challenges: large storage volumes, volatile memory with active process state, RAID configurations, virtualization layers, clustered architectures, and live application data that may be modified during collection. GDF's IT forensics team uses enterprise-grade acquisition tools and live response techniques to preserve server evidence with minimal disruption to running services, maintaining chain of custody throughout a process that would be straightforward on a single workstation.

Can cloud platform data be forensically collected?

Cloud platform data can be forensically collected through provider APIs, administrative console exports, cloud-native logging services (AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Audit Logs), and legal process directed to cloud providers. GDF Miami has experience collecting from all major cloud platforms and can work with counsel to structure preservation requests or subpoenas that capture the specific data required for the matter.

What is anti-forensic detection?

Anti-forensics refers to techniques used to destroy, obfuscate, or alter digital evidence to impede forensic analysis. Common techniques include secure file deletion, encryption, log tampering, timestamp modification, steganography, and use of privacy tools. GDF's examiners are trained to recognize indicators of anti-forensic activity, document evidence of tampering, and recover what evidence remains despite the attempt at concealment. These findings are themselves significant evidence in litigation and criminal proceedings.

Forensics

IT and Enterprise Forensics Across Workstation, Server, Domain and Cloud Tenant

Most real matters do not live in one environment. They live across a workstation, a domain infrastructure, a cloud tenant and a set of personal accounts, and the useful reconstruction requires evidence from all of them treated as one coordinated engagement. Departing-employee exfiltration, insider-threat matters, business email compromise, unauthorized access matters and the corporate incidents that do not neatly fit any one specialty page.

What IT and Enterprise Forensics Actually Answers

What actually happened. Reconstruction of the specific user actions, system events and network activity that produced the incident, cross-referenced across every environment the incident touched.
Who did it. Attribution of the activity to a specific user account, a specific device, or a specific external actor, anchored on the artifacts that survive the incident rather than on the initial narrative.
What was reached or taken. Determination of the specific data, systems or resources that were accessed, copied, modified or exfiltrated during the incident window.
How the actor got there. Reconstruction of the path from the initial foothold or trust position to the final consequential action, with each step in the chain documented.
What corrective action the environment actually needs. Findings translated into the specific architectural and procedural changes that close the exposure, not a generic security-improvement list.
What the recovery matter looks like. Support for the client’s subsequent action against the responsible party, whether that is a departing employee, an insider actor, an external attacker or a compromised third party.

Environments We Cover

Windows workstation and server

Windows workstation and server forensics across the enterprise Windows environment: registry artifacts, event logs, filesystem timeline reconstruction, application-layer artifacts (browser history, chat clients, cloud-sync clients, remote-access clients), and the specific artifacts modern Windows environments produce (Windows Defender ATP telemetry, Sysmon logs, PowerShell script-block logging where enabled).

macOS workstation and server

macOS forensics covering the Apple-specific artifact stack: unified logs, KnowledgeC and biome artifacts, Spotlight metadata, Time Machine backup analysis, and the specific application-layer artifacts macOS environments produce.

Linux workstation and server

Linux forensics for the enterprise Linux environments that surface in production infrastructure and technical-user workstations: audit-subsystem logs, systemd-journal, filesystem timeline reconstruction across ext4, XFS and btrfs, and the specific artifacts container and orchestration environments produce.

Active Directory and identity infrastructure

Domain-controller forensics, Kerberos-ticket analysis, Group Policy history reconstruction, and the specific attack-technique artifacts (Golden Ticket, Silver Ticket, Kerberoasting, DCSync) that identity-focused matters typically involve. Extends to Entra ID, Okta, federated identity providers and the trust relationships between on-premises and cloud identity.

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace tenants

Tenant-side forensics covering the audit logs, mailbox rules, forwarding configurations, mobile-device pairings, OAuth-application grants, sharing history, and the specific tenant-side telemetry each environment produces. Coordinated with the endpoint forensic record so the reconstruction reflects both what the user did on the device and what the tenant-side record shows.

Hybrid environments

Most real environments are neither pure cloud nor pure on-premises. The reconstruction covers the specific bridges each environment carries: Azure AD Connect, ADFS, ExpressRoute or VPN tunnels, hybrid Exchange, and the vendor-specific management and monitoring platforms that reach into both sides.

Endpoint-management platforms as evidence sources

Microsoft Intune, Jamf Pro, other MDM/UEM platforms, EDR platforms (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint) and their audit and telemetry records. These platforms often carry the most complete picture of what happened on a device, and the record is preserved as part of the engagement wherever the platform is in use.

How We Actually Work

Immediate triage and evidence-preservation planning. IT and enterprise evidence degrades fast. Volatile state disappears on restart, endpoint-management telemetry retention is often short by default, and tenant-side audit records have their own retention windows. Rapid engagement preserves the fullest evidence base.
Coordinated acquisition across the environments the incident touched. Workstation imaging (in-lab or through remote acquisition per the section below), tenant-side audit-log and configuration preservation, domain-controller and identity-infrastructure preservation, and endpoint-management platform record preservation.
Reconstruction across the acquired sources. Timeline reconstruction, actor attribution, data-flow tracing and root-cause analysis. Cross-referencing the sources against each other is where most of the value comes from.
Reporting for the audience the matter requires. Two-layer report (technical + narrative) structured for use in internal review, in any subsequent recovery matter, or in regulatory or law-enforcement engagement as the matter’s posture requires.
Coordination with counsel on the corrective-action plan and on the specific architectural and procedural changes the findings support.
Testimony from the analyst who performed the acquisition and reconstruction, available for deposition and trial.

Remote Collection Path for IT Forensics

Most IT-forensics engagements do not require physical possession of the affected devices. Workstation acquisition runs through the client’s existing management tooling (Microsoft Intune, Jamf Pro, other MDM/UEM platforms) where the tooling supports the required content classes, or through a lightweight agent deployed by client IT where a separate collector is preferred. Tenant-side and cloud-service evidence collects through authenticated API paths against the retained tenant-admin scope. Where the matter involves personal cloud accounts held by the affected employee (and where the client’s posture and any applicable consent framework support it), consent-based acquisition against those accounts runs through the same remote-acquisition path. See Remote Acquisition for the full scope of remote collection capability across cloud, computer and mobile endpoints.

Case in point

Coordinated Windows domain, Microsoft 365 and file-server reconstruction of a departing-employee exfiltration

A South Florida professional services firm identified suspicious activity on a departing senior employee’s workstation in the weeks before the resignation. Initial internal review by IT surfaced enough concern to escalate: unusual after-hours logon patterns, atypical volumes of file access on a specific practice-group share, and a spike in personal-email traffic outbound. Counsel retained us within 96 hours of the employee’s last day to reconstruct what had actually happened before evidence began to degrade.

The engagement ran across three environments concurrently. The employee’s workstation was preserved and imaged through the corporate management platform without alerting the employee (still nominally in-role during transition). The Microsoft 365 tenant records were preserved through the retained tenant-admin access: mailbox rules, forwarding configurations, mobile-device pairings, OAuth-application grants, sharing-link creation history, OneDrive activity and audit-log records across the ninety-day window bracketing the departure. The on-premises file server logs, VPN concentrator logs and endpoint-management telemetry were preserved from the domain infrastructure.

Reconstruction across the acquired sources established a specific pattern: bulk downloads of practice-group work product to the workstation during a two-week window, transfer of the downloaded content to a personal cloud storage account through a browser-based path (which left artifacts in browser history and in the endpoint-management HTTP-observation logs even though the content itself never crossed the corporate email boundary), and creation of Microsoft 365 sharing links to a small number of documents that were subsequently accessed from an IP address associated with the employee’s new employer. The reconstruction also cleared the employee of a separate allegation that had been raised during the internal escalation, which the evidence did not support.

The report supported the client’s subsequent claim against the departing employee and the new employer, and it survived challenge from opposing counsel on both the acquisition methodology and the reconstruction methodology. The client also used the specific findings to close the architectural gaps that had let the pattern occur (the personal-cloud-storage path was subsequently blocked at the browser policy layer, and the sharing-link creation was moved behind an approval workflow for specific document classes).

Where Our Miami IT Forensics Practice Runs Deepest

Departing-employee and insider-threat matters

Coordinated reconstruction across workstation, tenant, identity infrastructure and endpoint-management telemetry, supporting both the internal record and any subsequent recovery matter against the departing employee and the new employer.

Business email compromise and financial-fraud incidents

Tenant-side forensic reconstruction of the compromise vector, timeline and specific actions taken by the attacker (mailbox-rule creation, forwarding-configuration changes, sharing-link creation, wire-instruction fraud coordination). Coordination with the client’s bank, insurance carrier and law-enforcement engagement where the loss profile supports it.

Cross-border matters spanning LATAM subsidiaries

IT-forensics reconstruction across US parent and Latin American subsidiary environments, with bilingual reporting where the receiving audience requires it, and coordination with local counsel on the applicable data-transfer framework for the jurisdictions in play.

Corporate internal reviews and compliance matters

Scoped reconstruction supporting internal reviews and compliance-driven matters, with the tight population control and escalation discipline that internal matters typically require.

HNW estate and family-office matters

IT-forensics reconstruction against the specific technology patterns high-net-worth estates and family offices actually use: personal-email account activity, personal cloud storage, family-office administrative-system access, and the specific vendor and advisor accounts that touch estate matters.

Fintech, crypto and digital-asset internal matters

IT-forensics reconstruction for the Miami digital-asset cluster, including the specific systems trading platforms, custody environments and compliance platforms actually run on. Coordination with the client’s regulatory counsel where the reconstruction overlaps with an active examination.

Post-acquisition and due-diligence matters

Post-acquisition IT-forensics support where the acquiring party needs an independent view of the acquired environment’s state at handover, or where a due-diligence process needs a forensic-quality snapshot of a specific system or environment.

Reports and Testimony

Every engagement produces a two-layer report: technical documentation of the acquisition, tools, methodology and reasoning behind each finding, and a plain-language narrative counsel, executives and any tribunal can work with. The acquired evidence is preserved so the analysis is reproducible and available to opposing experts. The analyst who performed the acquisition and reconstruction is available for deposition and trial testimony.

Standards and Standing

Methodology anchored on SWGDE best practices for digital forensics, NIST SP 800-86 guidance on integrating forensic techniques into incident response, ISO/IEC 27037 guidelines for identification, collection, acquisition and preservation of digital evidence, and the platform-vendor guidance for each specific environment in play. Analysts hold digital-forensics credentials (SANS GCFE, GCFA, GNFA, GREM) and platform-specific credentials appropriate to the environments under acquisition. Reports are structured for authentication under Fla. Stat. § 90.901 and Federal Rules of Evidence 902(13) and 902(14), and for admissibility analysis under Daubert / Frye.

Last updated: September 4, 2026

Coordinated Reconstruction Across the Environments the Incident Actually Touched

Most real matters live across workstation, tenant, domain and cloud rather than in any one environment. Rapid engagement preserves the record across all of them before the retention windows start to close.

Request Consultation Call (786) 219-1210