The Role of Digital Forensic in Solving Cyber-crimes

The new generation all are using lots of electron devices. The computers and mobile devices are most popular of these. The people are doing their work related project to managing financial transactions and accounts online. While this has made our lives easier than ever before, it has created a new problem that we often don’t take seriously enough cyber-crime.

The cyber-crime refers to any illegal activity that occurs in the virtual word of cyber space and more the cyber-crime is defined as any crime that is committed over a network or Internet connections. It can be stealing passwords for braking information or committing fraud on an online action site. Cybercrime, also called computer crime, is any illegal activity that involves a computer or network-connected device, such as a mobile phone.

Unfortunately, cyber-crimes are hard to detect, and hard to prosecute, but law enforcement agencies are working on that by adding new professionals positions and training employees to handle specifically with cyber-crime.

There are many law enforcement agencies such as our local police force, The FBI as well as countless other agencies that rely on computer forensics to catch criminals. Computer forensics is quickly becoming used for many different areas of criminal investigations and there is now a methodology that is used.

Digital forensics is the process of uncovering and interpreting electronic data. The goal of the process is to preserve any evidence in its most original form while performing a structured investigation by collecting, identifying and validating the digital information for the purpose of reconstructing past events.

The context is most often for usage of data in a court of law, though digital forensics can be used in other instances.

Computer forensic investigation techniques are not only useful for solving cyber-crimes such as computer hacking or child pornography, but they also have helped to solve other crimes like murder, terrorism, organized crime, tax evasion, drug smuggling, extortion, and robbery cases because computers can store vast amounts of information: e-mail messages and e-mail addresses, contact lists, pictures, financials, research, videos, Internet history, and phone numbers and all of these things can provide information about people’s habits and interests.

The role of computer forensics in crime has advanced to evidentiary admission in a court of law. This is very important in how the evidence is maintained and collected and it has become quite a precise process in law enforcement. Demand is high for expertise in computer forensics.

The FBI uses IT professionals to gain serious evidence in their investigations and these crimes can be simple or hacking, espionage and even bank fraud. The FBI now uses computer forensics as a standard tool to investigate crime. Using devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and hard drives to collect the evidence needed to prove premeditation in some cases.

Computer forensics is the new frontier of criminal investigation for these agencies and it is growing daily. As technology enhances so do the crimes associated with using technology in criminal

Activity

Computer forensics is widely known for catching criminals in various types of fraud. However, investigators are now using computer forensics to catch murderers, and access encrypted data daily that will stand as evidence in a court of law.

Those who decide to enter this vocation are considered investigators. They will investigate encrypted files and using the “live box” method along with many other great new types of software used in the latest techniques available. Information technology professionals who choose this profession are considered in a class by themselves.

Many of the tasks included in this particular part of criminal investigation are recovering deleted files, deleted passwords and checking for breeches of security for cyber-crime. Once the evidence is collected it must be contained and translated for lawyers, judges and juries to examine.

While one might think that recovering fraud data is the main task of computer forensics this is just simply not true anymore. The origin of computer forensics began this way as most of the cases solved in the beginning were of this type.

The Department of Justice divides cybercrime into three categories:

• Crimes in which the computing device is the target, for example, to gain network access.
• Crimes in which the computer is used as a weapon, for example, to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack.
• Crimes in which the computer is used as an accessory to a crime, for example, using a computer to store illegally-obtained data.

The cyber-crime statistics illustrate some of the general trends in the field of hi-tech crimes. Marked increases in cyber-crime statistics result in an increasing need for professionals capable of responding to and investigating cyber-crimes, and conducting computer forensic examinations of evidence in these cases.

2017 IC3 Internet Crime Report: Demographic Highlights

The Internal Crime Complaint Center of the FBI receives 280,000 complaints per year in average, and since its inception in the year 2000, it has received almost 4 million reports. This year’s investigations show that the trend continued during 2016 but was a little higher, totaling 266,685 victims of Internet crime last year alone. The IC3 separates this population into five age groups to show which has a higher propensity to become a target.

People under 20 were the least affected group, amounting to just over 10,000 victims and nearly $7 million taken from them. Those between 20 and 29, however, saw ten times as many losses at $68 million and 46,300 people scammed approximately.

The group of victims ranging from 30 to 39 years old was the second most affected demographic, with almost 54,500 victims but just $190 million in losses. In contrast, 55,000 people over 60 fell for Internet scams and handed over close to $340 million.

A marked trend this year was the fact that losses increased with age. The older the group, the more money they got scammed out of them, as shown by the $224 and $298 million that those in their 40s and 50s got stolen respectively.

Unfortunately, the cyber-crime is increasing in the present. So this research hopes to study the cybercrime and legal background about cyber-crime and role of digital forensic in solving cyber-crimes.

Main Objectives

1. What is the cyber-crime?
2. Crime types
3. Legal background of cyber-crime.
4. What is a computer forensics investigation?
5. Types of cyber-crime investigators.
6. Computer Forensics Tools and Tasking
7. How to solve cyber-crimes?
8. How to protect yourself from cyber-crime?

And more in this research will help to understand currently, there are some legal enactments available in Sri Lanka to curtail internet related crimes the Sri Lankan cyber-crime and legal background.