Is special software required for forensic examination?
Yes. There are various options available to a forensic examiner, from widely used commercial applications and open source forensic tools, to custom programs. Although they are more expensive, Comraen believes in using the commercial applications. It is important that our findings are able to stand up in court, and there is plenty of case law in which the court has accepted and acknowledged the validity of the results from the more popular forensic applications. Using an open source tool or a custom-written application provides opposing counsel the option to question the tool’s capability and also make it much more difficult for another examiner to verify the results.
