What is Digital Forensics?

Definition of Digital Forensic

Digital forensics is also known as computer forensics, an application to determine a scientific examiner method to digital attacks and crimes. It is an essential condition of both laws and business in the modern era of technology and might also be advantageous and growth in its career.

It is also defined as “the way of identifying, preserving, examining, and analyzing the digital evidence, by validating the procedures, and its final representation of that digital evidence in the court to evident few legal questions regarding the crime and attacks.”

What is Digital Forensics?

Digital Forensics is the process of identifying, preserving, examining, and analyzing the digital evidence by validating the procedures and its final representation of that digital evidence in the court to evident few legal questions regarding the crime and attacks. It is a method of discovering proofs from digital media like a PC, mobile or cellular devices, servers, or networks. It gives the forensic department group the elite procedures and equipment to resolve difficult digital cases of crimes.

Digital Forensics Team will help the forensic team analyze, inspect, identify, and preserve the digital evidence that is populating on different digital devices.

Objectives of Digital Forensics

Below are the few objectives of using digital forensics:

• Evidence to Court: It recovers, analyzes, and preserves digital and forensic evidence in such a way that it will help in the investigation of the department to present the evidence in the court.
• Identifying the culprit: It aims to cause the attacks and identify the main culprit behind the crimes.
• Legal Procedures: To Design the methods at a suspicious crime place, which will assure that the evidence found is uncorrupted.
• Data Redundancy: Recover the files that were deleted and subdivide them from digital media to validate them.
• It also promotes you to find the evidence instantly and makes you identify the impact of the culprit on the crime or the attacks.
• Storing the evidence or the proofs by the procedures in the way of legal custody in the court of law.

Process of Digital Forensics

Digital Forensics follows a pattern where each case is first identified then preserved to analyze to document in such a way that it is then presented in the court of law to identify the culprit in the crime. Digital forensics involves the following steps:

1. Identification

It is the first and fore more step in the process that will include the forensic process like where the evidence is found, where the evidence is preserved, and then the way it is stored.

Electronic Device media includes PC, digital phones, IPads, etc.

2. Preservation

In this process, the evidence is stored in an isolating place to secure and preserve it from any thefts. It will stop people from buying digital device so that any kind of proof is not meddled with.

3. Analysis

In this phase, the inspection group will reform the chunks of evidence and find out the outcome based on the proofs or evidence resulting. But it may sometimes take a number of iterations to discover the support on a criminal case.

4. Documentation

In this stage, a series of all possible evident of data is being drawn from the given inputs. It will help in rebuilding the crime scene and analyzing it. Correct documentation of the crime scenes is documented with mapping of the crime scene, sketching the scene, and then relating its photographs with the documents.

5. Presentation

In this final step, the documents are summarized and explained to draw out the conclusion.

Types of Digital Forensics

There are a few types of digital forensics that include below:

• Disk Forensics: It will deal with deriving the evidence from digital storage media like USB Devices, DVDs, CDs, etc., by gathering the active files or modifying or deleting the files.
• Network Forensics: It is generally a sub-part of digital forensics relating to the monitoring and detecting of system network traffic to extract crucial data for all legal evidence to present at the court.
• Wireless Forensics: It is a part of the networking forensics type that aims for wireless forensics to allow the tools that are needed to gather and extract the evidence from networking wireless traffic.
• Database Forensics: It is a type of digital forensics that relates to the forensic study and collection of databases and their relevant metadata. It follows investigating techniques to query over the database to collect the evidence.
• Malware Forensics: This branch of forensic handles identify malicious code and studying their malware issues related to their workload, trozans, viruses, etc.
• Email Forensics: This forensic branch handles the recovery of the trashed data and analyses the contents of the emails, including the emails that are deleted or the calendar or the contacts in the email.
• Memory Forensics: It is a forensic analysis that collects the data from the computer’s cache memory or RAM dump and then gathering the evidence from that dump.

Advantages of Digital Forensics

Below are the few advantages of Digital Forensic:

• To assure the security of the digital forensic system.
• To gather the proofs in the law of court, which may point to have action on the culprit in the crime scene?
• It assures the forensic team to capture relevant information if their digital systems or traffic are not working as expected.
• Accurately track the series of cybercriminals’ crimes anywhere throughout the world.
• Gathers extracted, processed, and interpreted the forensic evidence to prove the cybercriminal’s action in the law.

Disadvantages of Digital Forensics

Below are the few disadvantages of Digital Forensic:

• There should not be any tampering with the digital evidence that is presented in the court. We need to prove that no data is corrupted.
• Storing electronic records is very costly.
• Legal advisors should have more knowledge on digital devices.
• It should need to give more secure and easily understandable evidence to the court.
• Court of Law accepts the evidence only if the tools follow specific standards.
• If the investigating officers are not knowledgeable, then the evidence they provide to court is not useful. The judge may discard them.

Conclusion

Digital forensic Tools are much accurate and more helpful to investigating officers who try to find the culprits who perform digital crimes or attacks. They are also used for digital criminal cases such as Theft of Intellectual Property, Industrial damage, Employment issues regarding their job security, and investigations on Fraud cases.

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