Any criminal offence that involves a computer/network can be known as a cyber crime or a computer crime. The computer could be used to either commit the crime or it could have been the target of the crime. The main target of computer forensics is to find digital evidence in a computer or any other digital media after a crime has occurred. Even though computer forensics is widely used in solving cyber crimes, it is also used in other crimes as well.
What is Cyber Crime?
Cyber crime or a computer crime refers to any criminal offence that involves a computer/network. In a cyber crime the computer could be used to either commit the crime or it could have been the target of the crime. Cyber crimes are widely committed with the intension of obtaining private and confidential information of another person/ organization and can result in high profile cases such as copyright violations, child pornography incidents, etc. In addition, there have been situations where cyber crimes are resulted in harassment, drug trafficking, etc. Cyber crimes that target a computer could include emitting computer viruses, denial-of-service (DOS) attacks and attacks done through malware. Examples of computer crimes that use computers include cyberstalking (stalking individuals using electronic media), fraud and identity theft, information warfare (using information to take advantage over a competitor) and phishing scams (attempts to obtain sensitive information such as usernames and passwords).
What is Computer Forensics?
Computer forensics focuses on finding digital evidence in a computer or any other digital media after a crime has occurred. Even though computer forensics is widely used in solving cyber crimes, it is also used in other crimes as well. Computer forensics carries on a methodical investigation to find out the incidents occurring with the digital media and the responsible parties for those actions. When recovering evidence from a computer system, three main steps, namely, acquire, analyze and report are taken place. And the results of these steps could be used as evidence in criminal proceedings. Any of the computer forensic evidence presented in the court is required to be authentic, reliably obtained and admissible. Computer forensic evidences has been used in as evidence since mid 1980s. Techniques such as cross-drive analysis (correlating information found in several storage devices), live analysis (recovering live data such as data in the RAM) and recovering deleted files are widely used in computer forensics. There are open source and commercial software tools that can be used to facilitate computer forensic investigations.
What is the difference between Cyber Crime and Computer Forensics?
Cyber crimes refer to any criminal offence that involves a computer/network, where the computer is used to either commit the crime or as the target of the crime, while computer forensics focuses on finding digital evidence in a computer or any other digital media after a crime has occurred. Computer forensics could be used to gather evidence in cyber crimes as well as in other crimes.