Digital Forensics and How it is Used in Investigation

On By Mayank Nautiyal

The more we use devices and computer systems more we get prone to Incidents and Crimes related to Digital Devices.Digital Forensics is very heavily used nowadays because of very high use of digital equipment for committing a crime.So let us Learn about Digital Forensics and How it is Used in Investigation.

Processing of digital data and analyzing it for the investigation purpose is called Digital Forensics.Digging out all the essential data for the purpose of the investigation is done through certain Tools.Tools like Digital Forensic Framework is one of the popular platforms to work in Digital Forensics field.

Majorly Digital Forensics is carried through certain steps those are –

1.Acquiring of Data-Searching for a piece of evidence and seizing of that data.The Raw data which is obtained for investigation is properly stored for further processes.

2.Inspection of Data-Applying all the techniques to extract the required data.Tools are used in this step.

3.Analysis of Data-Using all the data received and all the resources to prove the given case.

4.Reporting-All the examined raw data to be reported with all documentation.

How Digital Forensics is used in Investigation

1.Finding Trails-Every offender leaves traces knowingly or unknowingly.While we perform Digital Forensics, we could find the traces or footprints of the offender.While data is collected Traces of offender could be easily found.

2.Extracting Data at Rest- Data at rest means data which is been stored in hard drives or in any offline medium storage.The data deleted or formatted is been recovered in this through various Tools by the Investigation Team.

3.Finding the hashed value-The duplication of any data or cloning of data can be determined by these values.Hashed values are a numeric value which uniquely defines the data.The number of times data is manipulated, copied or overwrite can be identified by these values.

Types of Digital Forensics

  • Computer Forensics-Extraction, Evaluation, Analysis and Reporting of Data that is stored or Data which is at rest found in Computer Systems or in any storage device, is Covered in Computer Forensics.
  • Network Forensics- Data which is not at rest or which can be fetched or stored in remote places are covered n Network Forensics.This also includes tracing of devices which have used certain networks or fetched data.
  • Mobile Device Forensics-Data collection through the Mobile phones, SIM cards, GPS devices and tablets are all covered in this type of forensics.
  • Digital Image Forensics-Extraction of data from the certain Image file.This Forensics is used in Stegnography Data extraction.Stegnography means Hiding of data in an image.

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