Audit Trail
Definition
A log maintained by an accounting system, ERP, or cloud application recording who accessed, created, modified, or deleted each record, with timestamps. Audit trails are often the most probative evidence in financial fraud cases, showing which user made the fraudulent entry.
Related terms
- Chain of Custody
- The documented chronological record of who collected, handled, transferred, and examined a piece of evidence. For digital evidence, chain of custody includes...
- Electronically Stored Information (ESI)
- Any information created, stored, or transmitted in electronic form, including emails, database records, spreadsheets, accounting system logs, chat messages, and metadata. ESI...
- Hash Value
- A fixed-length digital fingerprint produced by running a file through a cryptographic algorithm such as SHA-256 or MD5. Identical files produce identical...
- Legal Hold
- A directive from legal counsel instructing relevant people within an organisation to preserve documents, data, and physical items that may be relevant...
- Metadata
- Data about data. In document forensics, metadata includes file-creation timestamps, last-modified dates, author fields, revision history, and embedded GPS coordinates in images....
Explained in
- Digital Evidence in Financial CasesA log maintained by an accounting system, ERP, or cloud application recording who accessed, created, modified, or deleted each record, with timestamps. Audit t...