With the obvious threat of global terrorism and the increasing use of computers in terrorism, governments need the capability to quickly investigate computer evidence. One big challenge in terrorism investigation is how computers handle different languages such as Cyrillic or Arabic. We will see later how EnCase deals with foreign languages.

Individuals

Many people donate their old computers to relatives or charitable organizations. Even if the hard-drives are erased, valuable information such as financial statements, emails or confidential work documents can be retrieved. In fact, in a future article, we will use the EnCase software to recover information from hard-drives bought from eBay and local yard sales.

Law EnForcement/Corporate Acceptance

Judging by the number of people that Guidance trains each year, it would seem that EnCase has become the standard for computer forensics. Dozens of shoulder patches from law enforcement agencies, both local and foreign, are tacked up on the "Wall of Patches".

Guidance conducts almost daily training classes for government and corporate entities. In fact, there were two classes going on during our visit. Above you can see a picture of one of the classes. Since some of the students are in sensitive law enforcement positions, we had to take the picture from the back of the room facing towards the instructor.