In the past ten years, there have been many innovations in technology that has benefited many businesses, companies, and organizations but these innovations have also become a tool for fraudster’s to practice cyber crimes.
To investigate these cybercriminal activities, Digital Forensic is required. It is the process of utilizing the current knowledge of technical advancement in the field of computer science to extract, breakdown and showcase evidence, which is further presented as proofs in cyber investigations and is applicable in criminal courts.
TOOLS AND TASKING
In digital forensic two sorts of data are collected, Persistent data which is stored in local hard drives and volatile data which is located in registries and RAM.
The digital forensic expert should know how to search this data and retrieve it without destroying it.
Digital Forensic consists of some aspects :
In the first aspect, the person searching for the evidence should be clear about the things he/she is looking for because digital crimes are of many types from child pornography to theft.
The second aspect requires the selection of appropriate tools for investigation and good knowledge of software.
As we say half knowledge is more dangerous than no knowledge, it could lead to things going wrong and vital evidence destroyed.
ROLE OF DIGITAL FORENSICS IN SOLVING CRIME
Hackers have become advanced with their methods of stealing online and doing illicit activities.
This means the persons tasked with solving these cyber crimes have to keep up with there pace and that’s why there has been many new digital forensic practitioner.
Digital Forensics also have applications in commercial, private or institutional organizations. The activities that we do on our personal computer system or our company’s network leave digital footprints in forms of caches, cookies, deleted files, backups etc.
It is essential that a company’s network administrator and network security team knows about Digital Forensic as cyber crimes are increasing day by day and their slight negligence can put the whole company at risk.
It can be beneficial for a company to know everything about it as the evidence that would be found about the intruder in the company’s network can further be used in the court’s prosecution.
A CASE OF CYBER SECURITY
Protecting consumer’s data is becoming a significant concern, and new laws are also being put up, If an organization fails to protect consumer’s data then it may end up in civil courts.
This happened with Facebook, As facebook’s data breach shocked the world exposing the identity of at least 90 million users due to which the company suffered massive losses and heavy criticism, It put a stain on the image of the company.
Facebook’s digital forensic team neglected a bug in its system, and the hackers exploited it and logged into other people profiles knowing each and everything about them.
After this incident, the company employed 10,000 to 20,000 more people in its security department and invested more for its cybersecurity.
Many large companies are putting a large portion of money in the IT department for network and computer security.
Organizations have built up security for their network [intrusion detection system (IDS), proxies, firewalls] which tell them the status of their security system.
CONCLUSION
The primary objective of Digital Forensics in cybersecurity is to recognize, accumulate and analyze the data as in such a way that it maintains the virtue of the collected evidence.
Thus every company should be appareled with technology that enhances the skills of the security team and protects the data from cyber attacks.
As cyber crimes rank as one of the top four economic crimes, Organizations need to adapt to forensics and use it as another tool against those who are committing cyber-crime.
