Computer Forensics

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Recommended: Importance of forensic evidence

Jessica Jenkins Professor Coutras CSIT 100-33 June 4, 2015 Computer Forensics When someone commits a crime, there are teams that are put together in order to analyze, interpret, and extract data from evidence found at a crime scene. In certain investigations, such as intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, fraud, and even in inappropriate email and internet use in the work place, the team who specializes in extracting data from electronic devices are called computer forensic analysts. When evidence is stored digitally, computer forensics is essential in bringing that evidence to the court while maintaining it’s integrity. To do so, they need to follow a set of guidelines. Those guidelines help ensure the evidence will hold up in …show more content…

Encrypted data is difficult to view because you need a password or a key to unlock it. It’s possible that the password or key is stored elsewhere on the computer or within the home, but it is also possible that the password is memorized. In such cases, there are ways around the encryption, but not always. Additionally, the examiners computer must be able to handle large amounts of data. If not, they might not have sufficient processing power to handle the amount of data and storage a hard drive contains. New technology is always surfacing and so examiners will sometimes find themselves analyzing something they’ve never done before. That is why it’s important for them to communicate with other forensic analysts because they may have already encountered such issues. In cases that the computer being examined belonged to someone who is also skilled in computer science, they have performed something called anti-forensics; a combination of encrypting files, overwriting data, modifying metadata, and disguising files. Though rarely done correctly, it is possible for anti-forensics to completely obscure evidence. Also, computer forensics can run into legal as well as administrative issues. Lawyers are able to twist the evidence. For example, they could say that a trojan horse was in the computer system and planted all the evidence without the clients knowledge. An example of an administrative issue is that there is nobody to say whether or not an individual is qualified to be an expert commuter forensic analyst. This is extremely problematic because it allows the court to question the quality and the integrity of the evidence and of the profession in

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