What exactly have I been given?¶

Before interpreting cyber material, establish exactly what the material is.

Evidential caution: that anything produced by an IT or security team is a direct technical record. It may instead be a screenshot, alert notification, exported report, analyst note, incident ticket, email summary or copied extract.

What this means¶

Those are not interchangeable.

A raw log entry may record a system event. An alert may show that a detection rule matched. An incident ticket may contain several people’s interpretations. A screenshot may omit surrounding events, field names, time-zone information or filtering. A written summary may be accurate, but it remains somebody’s account of the underlying material.

the relevant time zone;

complete timestamps;

account, device or session identifiers;

source and destination information;

the name of the security product;

the detection rule or reason for the alert;

the period covered;

any indication that records were excluded or filtered.

Your first task is classification, not interpretation. Once you know what you have, you can assess what it may show, what it omits and what additional records are needed.

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What to check or do next¶

• Ask who created the item, which system produced it, when it was created and whether it has been altered, reformatted or filtered. Identify the original data source and request the underlying records where proportionate.
• Check whether the item includes:
• Preserve the original file rather than copying its contents into a new document. If you receive a screenshot or PDF, retain that version but ask whether the source data can also be exported in a structured form.

Evidential limits¶

Do not assume that a technical-looking field has a universal meaning. Terms such as “user”, “host”, “source”, “risk”, “incident” and “malicious” may reflect product-specific labels.