The world of justice seems to be shaped by forensics investigation procedures, and popular culture has integrated many character figures from TV crime series that depict great forensics skills. There is an impressive number of tasks that a computer forensics investigator is capable of covering today: from autopsy techniques and forensic anthropology to DNA fingerprinting, computer facial reconstructions, toxicology and lots of others. Science has thus become the best method to fight crimes and prove a suspect’s guilt or innocence in the court of law. Investigators are in charge of the procedures, and they are the once to bear the responsibility.
There are methods, features, science experiments and interviews that define the complexity of a computer forensic investigation models even further. Starting from the crime scene, forensics investigation passes to crime procedures, lab tests and the rest. The crime scene provides the information for the lab computer forensic investigation, one would not be possible without the other, and negligence of any of them could lead to the failure of the justice process. The court evidence may be compromised if the crime scene is not analyzed correctly, therefore all forensic skills work in the direction of identifying evidence no matter how small.
The peculiarity of a forensics investigation further depends on the type of crime that the authorities are dealing with. The steps of a data analysis for instance will be different than those of a robbery. Thus, for computer forensics the investigator has to be prepared with the adequate equipment before starting data collection. The examination, the analysis and the reporting follow the identification of the forensic details. Each of these steps corresponds to different methods and procedures that converge into one single viable point: the identification and the prosecution of the criminal.
Depending on what kind of forensics investigation is necessary, different experts will be involved. In fact, all the results of such criminal analysis are a sum of several people’s contribution, because several forensic departments go through the evidence or investigate different aspects of the criminal act. There are cases when the lack of evidence doesn’t allow the legal system to follow its normal course. There are hundreds maybe thousands of such cases piling up worldwide because the police did not have enough evidence to support prosecution.