A timeline of events is assembled to understand the sequence of actions that occurred on a digital system. This helps to provide context to the incident and is key in understanding the scope and impact of an incident, which can lead to identifying the cause and the party responsible for the intrusion. A hash value, while important for verifying data integrity, does not give details about events. User permissions may indicate access control issues but do not create a sequence of events. Encryption algorithms are used to secure data, not to directly analyze an incident.