need help with comment about the discussion below: The integrity of evidence, especially digital evidence, is absolutely necessary when it comes to courts and how to view what evidence can be used or not in court. If the evidence has been changed or modified at all then they potentially lost evidence that could prove that a certain suspect did in fact do the crime. The last thing anybody wants is law enforcement to mess up evidence and enable the criminal to walk back out on the streets only do commit the crime again.

There are a number of ways that law enforcement can preserve the integrity of the digital evidence. First and foremost, documentation of the scene and of all the evidence should be in order. Without initial and deeper documentation on what law enforcement finds could leave open holes. Another step would be to take an exact copy of the original evidence to work with so that there is not way that someone could mess up and accidently modify the original. After this, the team needs to establish a chain of custody on the way of preserving it in a secure vault therefore nothing could chance it. The chain of custody will have documentation for every handoff and verification that the evidence has not been altered during every handoff. This ensures the data is preserved and not modified because of the extent of the documentation and chain of custody that is in place. You will take a copy of the evidence as soon as you find it and then compare the original to the copy to ensure there is no changes. When analysts look and make sure the data is not altered, they will compare hash values between the original and acquired (Michael, 2023).

A firewall is a network device that that monitors traffic to and from your network. Functions of a firewall consist of blocking unauthorized access, traffic filtering, defense, and possibly compliance (What is a Firewall, n.d.). Firewalls could have all or none of these depending on what you would want. Insider threats are one of the biggest limitations on a firewall because they only look at traffic coming in and out of the network, not insider traffic running around on the internal network.

Chris