Эссе: Evolution of cybercrime

The word forensic was derived from usage in the medical field. Forensic Medicine has been a recognised discipline as far back as the 18th century. The computer industry has been taking computer forensic serious for some years now due to embarrassing computer break-ins by hackers. Computer forensics is one of the largest growing professions of the 21st century. This is partly due to the growth of immoral and offensive activities which allows organizations and individuals to be susceptible to security threat. In the current scenario criminal activities had a major thrust in cyber space such as cyber terrorism, internet fraud, viruses, illegal downloads, falsification of document, child pornography, counterfeiting, benefit fraud, hacking etc. This led to the need for ethical hackers and computer experts to help prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. This is where the skills of a forensic expert come in order to prevent the activities of offenders.

In the contemporary IT revolution and the detriments associated with it becomes all the more significant as the concept of storing and processing information at incredible speeds and across vast distances has generated an environment where the mysteries of technology can propagate a clouded perception that leads to a lack of trust and market confidence. This in turn has led to a tremendous increase in crimes related to cyber world like data theft, industrial espionage, employee misconduct, intellectual property theft, hacking pornography etc. [1] These unconventional crimes which involve wide use of information technology, require adequate measures to be taken by the law enforcement agencies such as improvement of data retrieval system and the use of special equipment in crime detection operation, the development of hardware and software to provide active data protection and conduct computer assisted criminal intelligence, development of computer medaling methods to model crime situation to perform online detection analysis and make current and strategic forecasts. [2] With the technology evolving at such a rapid pace, the rules governing the application of cyber forensics to the fields of auditing, security and law enforcement are changing as well. [3] Computer forensics has also been described as the autopsy of computer storage Medias for evidence. In short, Cyber forensics can be defined as the process of extracting information and data from computer storage devices and conferring its accuracy and dependablility. The challenging task ahead is of course of finding this data, collecting it, preserving it, and presenting it in a manner acceptable in a court of law.