Cybercrime DB#5
People to interview to secure evidence in a computer-related crime and questions to ask
Before collective any evidence in a computer-related crime, forensic investigators should first document their interviews with anyone who might have any information that would help the investigation process. The people likely to be interviewed by a forensic investigator are:
- First responders: The first responders would need to provide any information concerning the evidence to ensure that they were not contaminated on arrival. The question to be asked is, did you touch anything in the room?
- Administrators: Computer and network administrators need to be interviewed and provide information on any interferences in the system before the crime. The question to be asked is, did you experience any fault in the system?
- Suspects: Any suspect related to the crime should be interviewed and all devices that he has come into contact with secured. The question to be asked is, what are your motives? Who do you work for?
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The top computer-related crimes
- Online harassment and threatening: Internet communications have enabled criminals to create a safe environment to threaten their victims (Britz, 2013). The convenience in online communication has led to virtual increasing in online victimization. Victims of this harassment are mostly children and females, while most of the stalkers are male. Online harassment may consist of threats that are sent through social media networks, instant message, or email.
- Phishing frauds: Phishing is the process whereby a hacker or cybercriminal tries to get personal or sensitive information from a computer. This practice is often done through phishing websites that are created to mimic legitimate websites in the hope that the user will enter some of his or her personal information.
- Identity theft: Hackers who have access to an individual’s credit card and banking account details may use this information to purchase anything using your details. One of the simple ways to protect tour identity is through monitoring your accounts carefully.
The future of computer-related crimes
The future of computer-related crimes will highly depend on Artificial Intelligence to carry out advanced cyber-attacks. Some of the future computer crimes would be:
- IoT hacking: The Internet of Things (IoT) has grown fast with home devices such as Google Home Hub and Amazon echo. These devices are often connected to the Internet wirelessly, which exposes them to hackers online.
- Social engineering: Social engineering will be the new norm of hacking as organized hackers would analyze their target’s information in medial social posts and tailor their attacks through phishing. These hacks have the potential to turn social media networks into chaos if there is no proper regulation and action.
- Cloud attacks: Currently, most companies use could-based solutions to increase their operational efficiencies. However, these cloud services would be a target for hackers who try to use centralized networks to leverage their customer’s rosters.
Evidence that would be looked into by forensic investigators
- Hard drives: External hard disks are often used as backup devices for huge amounts of data and also may be used to obtain criminal evidence (Britz, 2013). It is important for investigators to look into hard drives as they are essential in the “corroboration” of the collected evidence.
- Emails and text documents: Foreign investigators need to collect emails and text documents during a computer-related crime so at to find the chain of custody of anyone involved in the crime. These documents may also indicate future crimes that are planned and not yet happened, which would help investigators to stop it.
- Networks: Any machine connected to the Internet is likely to be attacked and compromised; hence it is important for forensic investigators to try and gather evidence from networks by detecting essential patterns in the network traffics related to any suspicious activities. Detecting important patters in the network is important to find a solution that may be used in detecting various types of attacks (Divakaran et al., 2017).
References
Britz, M. (2013). Computer forensics and cyber- crime: An introduction. Pearson.
Divakaran, D. M., Fok, K. W., Nevat, I., & Thing, V. L. (2017). Evidence gathering for network security and forensics. Digital Investigation, 20, S56-S65.