Next Generation Forensic Readiness for Building Trust in Social Communications

Digital evidence now sits at the centre of how we investigate crime, respond to cyber incidents, and settle disputes over what was actually said, shown, or shared. Messaging apps, social platforms, and synthetic media have multiplied the volume of that evidence while making its origin and integrity harder to establish. Forensic readiness, the capacity to collect, preserve, and rely on digital evidence before an incident rather than scrambling after one, has become a precondition for trust in social communications.

This one-day workshop, hosted by the UQ Cyber Research Centre at The University of Queensland, brings investigators, practitioners, clinicians, and researchers together to work through where forensic practice needs to go next. The forenoon track examines the problems law enforcement faces with volatile, encrypted, and manipulated evidence. The afternoon track turns to healthcare, where forensic readiness is part of keeping clinical systems running and patient data protected through and after a cyber incident.

Each track pairs keynote addresses from industry and academic leaders with live demonstrations of student research projects from our centre, so that open problems are discussed alongside working tools and prototypes.

The day also serves as a showcase for our AEA Ignite research on the Authentication and Provenance of Manipulated Media (APMM). That work builds tools to establish whether images, video, and documents circulating on social platforms have been altered and where they came from, the same question of evidential trust that runs through both tracks.