Ever since the dawn of civilisation, each society in the world has had to grapple with crime and deliberate violation of common laws by some rogue citizens. This has necessitated the creation of dedicated law-enforcement agencies and a system of crime control in every country. However, the nature of crime has never been static throughout history. It has kept pace with new technology and inventions that have been produced and incorporated by the society from time to time.
In the last 20 years or so, a profound change has taken place in the way the economy conducts business and produces goods and services. Information technology and computers have spread like wildfire around the world and have been adopted by citizens and companies to execute day-to-day tasks. This has added a new dimension to law-enforcement because of the emergence of a unique kind of crime – digital crime.
For thousands of years, the execution of any crime such as murder, theft and assault required the physical presence of the criminal on the spot. But information technology makes it possible for anyone to commit a digital crime sitting thousands of miles away.
Computers and other digital devices have many benefits. They are formidable force-multipliers and allow one to work quickly, achieve more in the same time and be productive many times over than one would otherwise be without the driving force of information technology. Computers from around the world are today interconnected by the Internet in a world-wide web.
Banks, airlines, insurance companies, research and development centres, police and defence forces-- everybody today exists in a networked environment. This has given rise to a breed of white-collar criminals that uses digital devices such as computers and mobile phones to commit a variety of offences. To keep pace with such digital crime, a new branch of forensics, called digital forensics, has come into being.
Digital forensics uses special tools, equipment, processes and training to hunt down criminals involved in digital crime. A common misconception among people is that it is easy to commit a digital crime since a person can connect to the targeted computer from any location in the world and disappear quickly without anyone getting to know about it. Nothing can be further from the truth.
In fact, whenever you copy a file or make any changes to digital data, it leaves imprints of your every activity which are almost impossible for anyone to erase. Digital forensic investigators follow these digital footsteps that criminals leave behind and trace the culprit. Digital evidence can be deleted by the criminals but actually cannot be completely destroyed.
Digital crime is of many types. The main ones include the following:
Hacking
Hacking is the most common digital crime in existence. Hackers are people with a very good knowledge of software coding which they use to outwit the defences of the target computer and gain illegal access. Any computer system can be the target of a hacker, such as credit card companies, banks, insurance, newspapers (where hackers post mischievous messages on the home page), airlines and so on. Many times, hackers are just teenagers who are having fun and showing off their technical prowess by hacking into sites deemed secure and fool-proof.
Terrorist Activity
Terrorists the world over have wised up to the power of computers, email and online chatting. They coordinate their moves and keep in touch with each other through email, forcing the intelligence agencies to monitor Internet traffic. Terrorists also use the Internet to download bomb recipes and maps.
Computers and tiny storage devices such as USB Flash drives are used by them to store their plans and easily transfer them from one place to another. Digital forensic experts get to work the moment a computer, laptop or storage device is recovered from a terrorist.
Illegal Websites and Emails
Many illegal activities are conducted on the Web such as Child pornography or illegal pharmacies selling prescription drugs in huge quantities to users for substance abuse. Some websites may be set up for defaming celebrities or spoiling the reputation of business competitors.
Another common misuse of digital devices involves sending threatening, pornographic or fake emails to unsuspecting people or office colleagues. Computer forensics investigators have the ability to track the people down who are the source of these websites and emails.
Industrial Espionage
Most intellectual property of businesses today reside on computers, such as engineering drawings, trade secrets, R&D results, future strategic plans and ways to meet the challenge from the competition. This is hot property for any company’s rival. Believing in the dictum that all is fair in love, war and business, some aggressive and unscrupulous competitors hire hackers to break into their competitor’s computers and steal sensitive information.
An employee of the competitor may be bribed to copy some files and smuggle the storage device such as a USB Flash drive out of the company. Industrial espionage is a thriving industry today. Digital forensics is the only way that such cases can be solved and the culprits arrested.