Chapter 18: Digital Evidence on the Internet


Overview

The growth of the Internet has greatly increased the ways that computers can be involved in a crime and creates many potential sources of digital evidence. Feeling protected by some level of anonymity, individuals often do things on the Internet that they would only imagine in the physical world and express thoughts that they would otherwise keep to themselves. What many people do not realize is that eavesdropping on a network is elementary and servers on the Internet retain a significant amount of information about individuals' activities, creating a cybertrail similar to a paper trail in the physical world.

Some of these data are transient, only remaining on servers for a few seconds, minutes, or days while other forms of digital data can be retrieved years later. These digital data can tell us about an individual's private thoughts and interests, patterns of behavior, whereabouts at a specific time - information that can be very useful in an investigation. As such, it is important for anyone who is involved with criminal investigation, prosecution, or defense work to be comfortable with the Internet as a source of evidence.

This chapter focuses on investigating criminal activity on the application layer of the Internet. Case examples are used to give a practical understanding of how the main services on the Internet can be involved in criminal activity and how they can be a source of digital evidence. The discussions of the Internet's application layer in this chapter can be generalized to any network, such as a company's internal network. Collecting digital evidence at the application layer is like taking a surface scraping of a network. For every piece of digital evidence found at the application layer, there is more related data in other layers of the network that can be obtained as discussed in previous chapters.




Digital Evidence and Computer Crime
Digital Evidence and Computer Crime, Second Edition
ISBN: 0121631044
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 279

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