Which practice is essential to ensure the protection of sensitive information during investigations?

Ensuring forensic integrity is critical during investigations involving sensitive information because it preserves the validity and reliability of the evidence collected. Forensic integrity involves maintaining a clear chain of custody for evidence, ensuring that it remains unaltered and is authentic throughout the investigative process. This practice allows investigators to confidently analyze the data, knowing that it has not been tampered with or corrupted.

When forensic integrity is upheld, it enables the findings to be admissible in legal proceedings, as the integrity of the data can be demonstrated. This is essential in cybersecurity, where evidence must be robust against scrutiny and potential legal challenges.

While practices like data minimization, encryption, and access logging are also important in protecting sensitive information, they serve different purposes. Data minimization focuses on limiting the amount of data collected to what is necessary, encryption protects data at rest and in transit, and access logging tracks who accesses data and when. Each of these plays a role in a comprehensive security strategy, but they do not directly address the preservation of evidence integrity during an investigation in the same way that ensuring forensic integrity does.