What does 4N6 mean?

4N6 is an abbreviation of 'forensics' commonly used in the digital forensics community.


It is a numeronym - a word that is composed partially or wholly of numerals and is usually an abbreviation. Other examples of numeronyms include B2C business-to-consumer, K9 canine, and i18n internationalisation.

Our Company

4N6 Ltd provides, amongst other things, digital forensics services in the UK for commercial and civil cases. The meaning of 4N6 is slightly deeper for us due to the other services we offer. We provide assistance and expert advice in Cybersecurity and Advanced IT Diagnostics & Troubleshooting; integral to these services is the internet, which uses two different types of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses - IP version 4 and IP version 6.


IP Addresses

IPv4 addresses are made up of 32 bits (4 bytes) usually displayed in a human readable form as 4 numbers in the range 0-255 separated by a dot (e.g. 213.68.7.253). There are 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses, but some of these are reserved for special purposes. Although this may sound like a lot, it's only about one IP address for every two people on Earth.


IPv6 addresses instead use 128 bits, giving a possible 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IPv6 addresses - enough for all the people, animals, plants and dinosaurs that have ever existed on Earth to be given thousands of IPv6 addresses each. At the moment, it feels safe to say that we'll probably never run out of them!


Our Brand

The 4N6 logo and colour palette combine various elements including;

  • a hexagon — a secure environment, a mobile phone cell and the outline of a 3-dimensional server enclosure;
  • intersecting curved lines — networks spanning the globe and the connections they provide;
  • purple — wisdom, creativity and independence; and
  • blue — trust, reliability and intelligence.


Of course, creative works are subjective, so if you find a different interpretation - please let us know.