12/7/12

Computer Forensics This is a report that talks about how the rate of computer crime has increased so much over the last years. Computer forensics is a branch of digital forensic science pertaining to legal evidence found in computers and digital storage media. The goal of computer forensics is to examine digital media in a forensically manner with the aim of identifying, preserving, recovering, analyzing and presenting facts and opinions about the information. Computer crime is most common known as any crime that has been accomplished through out special knowledge of computer technology in the world. Increasing the rates of many crimes that involve computers as more businesses made and the information held by the computers becomes an important part of computers. Computers can also become a big part of objects of crime when their pieces are damaged a example of that is when people attack the computer itself, or when a computer virus which is a program that can be capable of changing or erasing computer memory is introduced or shown into a computer system.

The computer crime and computer related crime has grown, and even has jumped 45% between 2002 and 2003. Today it is used to investigate a wide variety of crime, including child porn, fraud, cyberstalking, murder and rape. The discipline also features in civil proceedings as a form of information gathering. As many of the computer crimes computers show the electronic environment in which frauds are programmed and executed. A example in which can be the transfer of money balances in accounts to random peoples accounts for withdrawal. Computers are and can be used as pieces of crime when they are used to plan or control such criminal or bad acts. There is many examples of these types of crimes are complex and that they might occur over very long periods of time, or when a computer user uses a computer to steal or change the valuable information from an employer on the computer. There are a few techniques that are involved with computer forensics. Cross-drive analysis is a forensic technique that gets information found on multiple hard drives. The process still being researched, can be used to find social networks and to perform operations. Live Anaylsis is the examination of computers from within the operating system using custom forensics or existing tools to find evidence. This is useful when dealing with encrypting file systems. Deleted files is a common technique used in computer forensics is the recovery of deleted files. Modern forensic software have their own tools for recovering out deleted data. Most operating systems and file systems do not always erase physical file data, allowing investigators to reconstruct it from the physical disk sectors. File carving involves searching for known file headers within the disk image and fixing deleted materials. Steganography is one of the techniques used to hide data is steganography, this is when of hiding data inside of a picture or digital image. This process is often used to hide pornographic images of children as well as information that a given criminal does not want to have discovered. Computer forensics professionals can fight this by looking at the hash of the file and comparing it to the original image. While the image appears exactly the same, the hash changes as the data changes.

Since many of the first cases of computer crimes were reported in 1958 computers have been used for most kinds of crime including fraud, theft, embezzlement, burglary, sabotage, murder, and forgery. One study of 1,500 computer crimes were found out that most of them were committed by trusted computer users within businesses persons with the computer skills, knowledge, access, and resources. Much of known computer crimes has been involved of entering false data into computers. This method of computer crime is simpler and safer than many of the other complex process of writing a program to change data