Digital Forensics Dispatch

City Council Surprised by Resets of Computers

September 20, 2022

Rick Harvey of the Lovely County Citizen recently published an article about “computer resets” that had been performed in Eureka Springs, AK. At a recent city council meeting, the city council members were “surprised to learn that some electronic devices examined as part of a lawsuit against the city’s advertising and promotion commission [CAPC] were ‘wiped clean’ before being inspected by an out-of-state forensics company”, Harvey writes.

The forensic company managed to collect data from a total of 39 devices in the CAPC. “The Citizen obtained copies of the email correspondence through an open records request to LaFever [Counsel for defendants]”, Harvey states.

In these emails, there is information from the digital forensics firm that indicates that several computers and tablets “were not able to be accessed, with some being factory reset.” If the devices were restored to their factory settings, then it is highly likely that the data on those devices was completely overwritten rendering any previously existing data unrecoverable.

From what it sounds like, members of the city council did not authorize any resets of devices and that an out of state technology service provider may have come in and performed a reset of the computers.

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