When incident data is collected, it is important that evidentiary cross-contamination is prevented. How is this accomplished?

Allowing unrestricted access increases contamination risk by enabling multiple parties to inadvertently alter, delete, or intermingle evidence.

Preventing physical contact addresses traditional physical evidence handling and does not protect against digital cross-contamination of stored data.

Removing power from devices destroys volatile evidence such as RAM contents, running processes, and network connections, potentially losing critical forensic artifacts.

Using the evidence device as its own storage medium would overwrite or alter existing data on that device, destroying or tainting the original evidence and invalidating chain of custody. Forensic best practice requires imaging evidence to a separate, write-blocked or verified clean storage medium so the source device remains unmodified and admissible.