What is Digital Forensics?
Digital forensics is the process of detecting and translating digital data. It is a branch of forensic science that focuses on identifying, acquiring, processing, analyzing and reporting on data stored electronically.
Digital Forensics is a field of forensic science encompassing data recovery, investigation, examination and analysis. It is collecting and presenting the evidence gathered from the digital media.
Use of digital forensics
Digital Forensics is a technique of finding evidence from digital media like a computer, mobile phone, server or network. It helps the forensic team with the best methods and tools to solve complicated digital-centric cases.
It helps the forensic team analyze, examine, identify and preserve digital evidence on various electronic devices.
Objectives of computer forensics
1. It helps recover, analyze and preserve computers and related materials to support the investigation firm so that they can present them as evidence in the court of law.
2. To understand the motive behind the crime and identify the culprit.
3. Designing the procedures at a suspected crime scene that helps to ensure the evidence is not manipulated
4. Recovering deleted files and partitions from the digital media to extract and validate the evidence.
5. It helps to identify the evidence quickly.
6. Producing the computer forensic report that offers complete information on the investigation
7. Conserving the evidence by following the chain of custody.
Benefits of Digital forensics
1. To make sure the integrity of the computer system
2. To produce evidence in the law court to help in the process of punishing the culprit
3. Help the companies to capture important information if their computer systems r networks are compromised
4. Track cyber criminals effectively from all across the globe
5. It helps to protect the organization’s time and money
6. Allow to extract, process, and interpret the factual evidence to prove the action of cyber criminals in a court of law.
Five digital forensic elements
1. Identification: The main aim of this element of Digital forensics is to identify the purpose of the investigation and identify the resources required. It is the first step in the process. The identification part mainly includes what evidence is present, where it is stored, and lastly, in what format it is stored. The storage mediums include personal computers, mobile phones, PDAs and more.
2. Preservation: The data is isolated, secured and preserved in this process. The primary purpose of the investigation includes preventing people from using the digital device so that the digital evidence is not tampered with.
3. Analysis: Here, the investigation agents reconstruct data fragments and draw conclusions based on evidence. It usually takes many loops of examination to support a specific crime theory.
4. Documentation: In this step, the investigator creates a record of all the visible data. It involves the proper documentation of the crime scene, photographing, sketching and crime-scene mapping. This helps in recreating the crime scene and reviewing it.
Presentation: This is the last element of digital forensics and involves summarization and explanation of conclusions is done. However, it should be written in layman’s terms using theoretical or hypothetical terminologies. All abstracts so created refer to the specific skills.
