What a pain this virus situation has been! But we’ve been able to figure out how to best serve our clients’ computer forensic needs by doing things remotely.
Cell Phones
We have the ability to install an instance of Cellebrite on a distant Windows computer, as well as TeamViewer. The owner of the cell phone hooks up their device to the PC, then we remote in with TeamViewer and engage Cellebrite to capture the image, which is pushed up to the cloud so we can analyze on our end. Piece of cake!
Computers
Similar process to remote cell phone imaging, we ship a USB hard drive to where the computer user is, and we run the imaging software remotely without installing it on the computer. The user then just ships the drive with the image back to us. Not as good as removing the internal drive, write protecting it and create a bit stream image, but this methodology is defensible, particularly when targeting the collection.
Both processes are extremely easy, and they knock down travel expenses- so keep them on your radar!