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Investigation, collection of photos, videos and other artifacts are becoming sophisticated to scrutinize criminal cases and discover bad perpetrators in illegal actions. The employment of scientific or technical data to address the questions in court law refers to forensic. As defined by CNN, “digital forensic refers to branch that focuses on the identification, acquisition and analysis of information found on digital devices, digital cameras, cellular phones or any computer-based systems .” Since the introduction of personal computers 30 years ago, the advent of the internet 20 years ago and the continuous usage and launching of various smart phones for the 10 years, many types of digitally-made artifacts such as text messages, videos and photos have been available for investigation. In fact, these have been targets and instruments for record keeping and criminal activities over the last couple of decades.
Digital forensics has several stages that include preservation, collection, examination and analysis. Preservation refers to preventing any actions that can harm the digital information. This action also refers to freezing of the crime scene. Collection, on the other hand, refers to the activity of obtaining and collecting digital information that are applicable to the investigation. This action may entail removing of personal computers or laptops from the crime scene, printing or copying of files from hard disk or servers. The stage of examination is when investigators conduct thorough systematic analysis, study and search of evidence that concerns the exploration. The results of this study and examination are available from the artifacts, files and information and other collected items. Finally, the analyses intend to draw conclusions and recommendation based on the available evidence .
Several security organizations have been practicing digital forensics because of its benefits. Digital forensics ensures overall survivability and integrity of network infrastructures. Employing digital practice of preserving evidences eliminate the threat of destroying vital facts or having forensic proof unacceptable in a court law. Study also shows that implementing digital forensics save organization some resources when deploying security devices such as firewalls, proxies, intrusion detection systems and other computer security devices . In order to understand further, digital forensics has few sub-branches in respect to the types of media, devices or artifacts. These sub-branches include mobile device forensics, computer forensics, network forensics and database forensics. The mobile device forensics relates the retrieval of digital data and evidences from mobile or smart phone devices. Smart phone devices are useful when collecting location information, either from its built-in GPS or location tracking devices or through cell site logs. This information tracks their devices with their range. On the other hand, the computer forensics handles broad range of information from internet log history through the actual files and documents from its hard disk. Beyond the actual computer, this type of forensic investigation also covers implanted devices such as onboard memory, USB devices or pen devices. Network forensic covers investigation, analysis and monitoring of traffic within computer networks. These networks cover the local area network and the wide area network environment. Its purpose is to uncover network data or intrusion detection. Other investigators also use database forensics to study databases, metadata and other data in computer RAM .
Works Cited
Carrier, B. and E. Spafford. "An Event-based Digital Forensic Investigation Framework." Information Assurance and Security (2004): 1-12. Document.
"Computer Forensics." 2008. Document.
Dezfoli, F., A., Mahmoud, R. Deghantanha and N. Binti. "Digital Forensics Trends and Future." International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics, 2(2) (2013): 48-76. Document.
Kessler, G. Smartphones help catch a terror suspect. 14 April 2013. Web. 30 November 2014.
