What Is Cyber Forensics and Why Is It Important for Businesses?

Cyberattacks are increasing with each passing day costing billions of dollars to organizations all over the world. Therefore, to ensure that the same vulnerabilities are not exploited again, organizations need cyber forensics experts to investigate and determine the root cause of cyberattacks while implementing much-needed security measures to prevent such attacks from happening in the first place.

This article will discuss cyber forensics, different types of cyber forensics, and the importance of cyber forensics in cybercrime.

What Is Cyber Forensics?

In simple words, cyber forensics is gathering, analyzing, and investigating data from a computer or mobile device, which is then converted into proof to be presented in court. The primary goal of cyber forensics is to determine who is responsible for cyberattack while documenting the evidence and subsequently performing a thorough investigation.

Cyber forensics is a necessary and integral tool in the fight against cybercrime. The list of cyber threats has exponentially grown in the last decade and includes various acts such as identity theft, cyberbullying, terrorism, and much more. Cyber forensics experts’ responsibility is to use different cyber forensics tools to investigate such cyberattacks and present actionable insights that the organization can use to take corrective actions.

Types of Cyber Forensics

The following are the different types of cyber forensics that you must know about if you are interested in having a career in cyber forensics.

1. Network Forensics

Network forensics is one of the types of cyber forensics that deals with monitoring and analyzing computer network traffic to collect legal evidence and important information that can help with the investigation process.

2. Database Forensics

Database forensics is another type of cyber forensics related to the study and thorough investigation of databases and the related metadata.

3. Email Forensics

Another type of cyber forensics is email forensics, which deals with the recovery and analysis of emails. The investigation includes recovering deleted emails, contacts, and information from calendars as well.

4. Mobile Phone Forensics

Another type of cyber forensics is mobile phone forensics, which deals with analyzing and investigating mobile devices. It generally involves recovering SIM and phone contacts, incoming and outgoing SMS, audio, videos, and call logs, among other things.

5. Malware Forensics

Malware forensics is another type of cyber forensics that deals with identifying malicious code and involves the study of their viruses, payload, and worms, among other things.

Importance of Cyber Forensics in Cybercrime

Cyber forensics plays an important role in the identification of cybercrime. It is needed for the investigation of crime-related activities and law enforcement. There have been several instances such as hacking and denial of service wherein the computer system act as the crime scene. Therefore, in such scenarios, the proof of the crime is hidden inside the computer system. This proof can be emails, documents, browsing history, or anything else. Therefore, to investigate the crime scene and present proof in the court of law, cyber forensics plays a crucial role in eliminating cybercrime.

Growth of Cyber Forensics Jobs

Cybercrimes are only increasing by the day. Therefore, organizations need computer forensics or cyber forensics experts to solve various cybercrimes. Moreover, the future of the IT industry lies within cyber forensics. With people becoming more and more dependent on technology, cybercrimes will only increase in the future. Therefore, there will be a lot of demand and growth the cyber forensics jobs.

Source: eccouncil.org