Digital Forensics Has Lost a Key Tool: Goodbye, Google Cache

An often-told tale of a digital forensics investigation is where a target website has revealed key elements of information that a timeline of activity. This might be related to a site which was trading illegally, but when under investigation, the Web site was changed. For investigators have often turned to Google Cache to examine previous versions of a Web site:

A typical use case is when a Web site has been hacked or taken-over. With this, an investigator could pin-point the exact time that a Web site changed for its content. This often contained key information for the investigation.

But, now, Google has “quietly” dropped the service:

Overall, Google outline that the cache feature allowed users to view a cache when it was not loading correctly, but these days, we use Web caches that deliver Web pages from the edge of the Cloud (and not fully from a server). This means that the Web is so much more reliable than it used to be.