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 unbroken documentary trail of who held a sealed exhibit, when, and under what seal, from the moment of collection through analysis...
- Electronically stored information (ESI)
- The US legal term for any information created, stored, or communicated digitally. ESI includes emails, accounting databases, spreadsheets, instant messages, ERP records,...
- 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...