7906Ict Digital Forensics | Computer Assessment Answers

Explain the basic primary tasks, high-level investigation processes, and challenges of a computer forensics specialist.

Provide an overview of how computing devices are used in crimes of today and how these crimes can affect a company's data and information.

Discuss how computer forensics investigations pertain to the law and trying of cases. 

Explain how you could assist in investigating the potential ongoing sexual harassment complaints and determine how you would communicate this to the Board of Directors. 

The high level investigation process can be categorized into four different sections:

• The first stage involves the collection of the information’s along with making of observations. In this stage the forensic data are collected and examined which includes the verification of integrity and authenticity of the evidences.
  
  
• The second stage involves the formation of a hypothesis so as to explain the observations. During the process of gathering the information the experts are also associated with providing the possible explanations of the information gathered.
  
  
• The third stage includes the providing of explanations of the hypothesis. This explanations acts as a crucial section of the investigation process as the success of the analysis is dependent on how thoroughly the initial hypothesis is tested (Farid, 2018).
  
  
• The fourth stage includes the drawing of the conclusions along with communicating of the findings of the investigation.

Overview of how computing devices are used in crimes and affects on a company's data and information

Making use of the computing devices for crime is a new problem and this type of problem is generally conducted by making use of a computing device and a network. This devices ranges from computers to mobiles. The different type of crimes conducted includes hacking, stealing, misuse of the data, child grooming and many more. Spam is one of the crime which is conducted by sending of spam emails so as to conduct commercial benefits (Watson & Dehghantanha, 2016). Fraud is another crime which is a dishonest way of making someone face losses which might lead to benefits of the attacker. Malware or virus is another kind of crime conducted by making use of computing devices.

The companies are associated with suffering a lot of problems due to this type of crimes as the hackers are associated with steeling of the confidential data along with the future plans of the organization which initially leads to huge losses of the companies. The hacker who is associated with the stealing of the information sells it to the rival companies in order to earn money (Farid, 2018). Hacking of the organizations also leads to customer dissatisfaction as their important data like credit card information and many more are lost. This type of crimes are also responsible for the decrease in productivity of the companies.

Computer forensics investigations 

Computer forensic investigations is associated with following the standard process related to digital forensic and this process mainly involves the acquisition of evidence by making use of a computer platform, subsequent analysis and reporting. Besides this various kind of techniques are used for the purpose of conducting investigations related to computer forensics (Rogers, 2016). This investigation includes the cross-drive analysis, live analysis, and the studying of deleted files. 

Cross-drive analysis is defined as the forensic technique which is associated with correlating the information that are present on multiple hard drives (McCarry & Donaldson, 2017). This process is mainly used for the purpose of identifying the social networks or for the purpose of detecting any kind of anomaly. Live analysis include the examining of the computers within the operating system by making use of the custom tool so as to extract the evidence. 

Investigation of ongoing sexual harassment complaints

The potential ongoing sexual harassment complaints are to be investigate by making use of the four basic steps of digital forensic investigation. That is first of all the required evidences are to be gather by talking with the persons who have lodged the complaint. It is essential to keep the collected data confidential. After the evidences are collected this are to be documented along with the supporting documents so as to explain the evidences that has been gathered. Before presenting this evidences to the Board of directors it is very much essential to analyse the evidence that has been collected in order to make sure that there exists no fake information (Chawki et al., 2015). Forensic imaging of the electronic devices submitted by the victim of sexual harassment can be used in order to gather evidences.

References:

Chawki, M., Darwish, A., Khan, M. A., & Tyagi, S. (2015). Sexual harassment in cyberworld. In Cybercrime, Digital Forensics and Jurisdiction (pp. 65-78). Springer, Cham.

Dang-Nguyen, D. T., Pasquini, C., Conotter, V., & Boato, G. (2015, March). RAISE: a raw images dataset for digital image forensics. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (pp. 219-224). ACM.

Farid, H. (2018). Digital forensics in a post-truth age. Forensic science international, 289, 268-269.

McCarry, M., & Donaldson, A. (2017, September). Gender based violence on UK campus': intervention, prevention and policy responses. In IInd European Conference on Domestic Violence.

Rogers, M. K. (2016). Psychological profiling as an investigative tool for digital forensics. In Digital Forensics (pp. 45-58).

Watson, S., & Dehghantanha, A. (2016). Digital forensics: the missing piece of the internet of things promise. Computer Fraud & Security, 2016(6), 5-8.