What Does a Forensic Investigator Do After a Data Breach?

A digital forensics investigator confirms and scopes the incident, preserves evidence (including volatile data like active memory and network connections, before anything is powered down), and collects artifacts like disk images, firewall and VPN logs, and endpoint detection logs. From there, they reconstruct a timeline of the attack, identify how the attacker got in, and determine what data was actually accessed.

This investigation directly drives your legal notification obligations, since what you have to disclose, and to whom, depends on what forensics confirms was accessed. See The Forensic Investigation Process for the full walkthrough.