Since anyone can put anything they want on their servers, it seems like a lot of evidence could be thrown out in court cases if access to that information is not strictly monitored and audited to make sure the owners aren’t removing or adding data.
Does anyone know of industry-standard practices to ensure that data on servers is not being manipulated in a way to protect or harm users?
This question is a whole lot of chaos.
It depends a lot on which country you are thinking of.
You say courts would look into log files. No, they don’t. Experts do stuff like that.
Why do you ask for industry standards when it’s about legal stuff. There are legal procedures. Or maybe not.
Whether anyone cares about user data, that’s one of the things that’s very very different in all countries.
And lines of business too.
The finance world has different regs than say manufacturing or a reseller.
The industry standards would be what major tech companies do in order to comply and make sure that when their data is involved in a legal battle, they can prove that it hasn’t been tampered with.
Any country is fair game since I’m interested about any general knowledge, but I’m mostly curious about Western nations such as the United States.
It depends on the industry.
Finance has stricter regs about retention than most others.
Your finance data in any company may need to comply with regs, but may also need to comply with your legal team.
It really varies, even by company, or by business unit/vertical. Or class of data.
Compliance is an entire business itself. I’ve had to do compliance training every year, and not as someone who holds the keys to major data, but interacts within a company, and may handle different types of data.
If you mean like a file for evidence got stored and you want to ensure it wasn’t tapered with you can generates a checksum hash then record that hash elsewhere for verification later. Drives will also store access times, even if no data was changes, but just touched or viewed
So you think you get ~200 responses now, one from each country LOL
Probably not, since most people don’t know this kind of information about most countries.