- Thursday, 26 May 2011
Forensic science and technology plays a vital role in the criminal justice system by providing technologically and scientifically based information through the analysis of physical evidence. During an investigation, evidence is collected at a crime scene or from a person, analyzed in a crime laboratory and then the results presented in court.
Computers may constitute a ‘scene of a crime’, for example with hacking or denial of service attacks or they may hold evidence in the form of emails, internet history, documents or other files relevant to crimes such as murder, kidnap, fraud and drug trafficking.
It is not just the content of emails, documents and other files which may be of interest to investigators but also the ‘metadata’ associated with those files. A computer forensic examination may reveal when a document first appeared on a computer, when it was last edited, when it was last saved or printed and which user carried out these actions.
More recently, commercial organisations have used computer forensics to their benefit in a variety of cases such as;
* Intellectual Property theft
* Industrial espionage
* Employment disputes
* Fraud investigations
* Forgeries
* Bankruptcy investigations
* Inappropriate email and internet use in the work place
* Regulatory compliance
