Computer Forensics

The world of crime is a frightful one, especially when we refer to violent crimes. There was a time when crime rate was skyrocketing, but the means to fight it were very modest. In those days, making an example out of the criminal sometimes worked as many miracles as the current law enforcement activity nowadays, by inhibiting the desire to kill, to rape or to steal. It is so that we retain horrible executions in the Middle Ages, like those of the Romanian Ruler Vlad the Impaler, who was wrongly associated with the fiction character Dracula, or the Russian tzar Ivan the Terrible, or Henry VIII of England.

As human rights became more appreciated and in some countries were proclaimed state laws the need to respect and preserve human life became more pressing. Thus, a new science emerged, criminology, meant to understand and counter criminal activity. In time, as technology advanced, crime advanced and so did criminology.

A very important field of criminology is called forensics. Forensics is a science branch related to biology and medicine. Forensics determine whether some deaths occurred as result of natural causes or were provoked by criminal acts. Even in the pre-modern times there were some ways of determining causes of death: types of strangulations, suffocations, drowning and so on. Modern forensics is so sophisticated that it can practically ascertain all causes of deaths, and if practiced with professionalism and ethics, it cannot fail. Etymologically, the word “forensics” comes from the Latin word “before the forum” because the crime charges were presented in the ancient Rome before the forum.

As a consequence of technological advancement, forensics diversified, because crime diversified. When computers became a part of people’s life, they didn’t choose to go to the honest people only. So, those with criminal propensities got access to the virtual computer world, too. That made it mandatory for the criminalists to develop a new branch of forensics: computer forensics.

Computer forensics is a part of legal evidence providing activity and it aims to discover the evidence in the computer used by the parts in the legal trials. Given the wide range of actions that can be performed on computers, this type of forensics has sub branches, such as: firewall forensics, network forensics, database forensics, or mobile device forensics.

There are many ways in which forensics expertise can be performed. In criminal law, forensics can be performed on the defendant’s computer, while in the civil cases, the forensics can help litigants. Forensics can be employed in cases there is a need to retrieve documents or any kind of data due to a software or hardware failure.

There are situations though when forensics is being performed on the plaintiff’s computer: such case occurs when determining a previous break into the victim’s computer system. Forensics is used to gather data about someone who’s actions  are being scrutinized by the law enforcement agencies; it is also used to the purpose of debugging, or reverse engineering.

When entering someone’s computer, forensic engineers must never change the data on it, the case officer being held directly and solely accountable for the correct observation of the laws that stipulate this sort of activity. In some cases, an audit trial of the computer evidence gathering process should be performed.

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