Don’t be the anchor: Rethinking the DFIR workflow loop
Brief
By Christopher Vance
Originally published in the July 2026 issue of Magnet Unlocked. Want to be the first to see new content? Sign up for our monthly newsletter, Magnet Unlocked.
The anchor I see most often in a digital forensics lab isn’t a person.
It’s a workflow template.
Something a predecessor built years ago, that we’ve been regenerating on every case since, that nobody on the receiving end has opened in a long time. We keep building it because the request keeps coming. The request keeps coming because we keep building it. That’s the loop, and it’s quietly the single biggest thing holding digital forensics back right now.
Not the tooling. Not the backlog. Not the budget. The loop.
My colleague, Brandon Epstein wrote recently about the courtroom cost of “ we’ve always done it this way ,” how it can get a method torn apart on the stand.