Cyber Crime

Yet, cyberspace is, in the end, a place populated by humans, or perhaps more correctly, by human minds, since it is our intellects that reside and meet one another there. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of the problems of the 'real' world carry over into this new realm. Crime is one of them.

The Internet (a term which once referred to a specific set of networked computers which has now increasingly come to mean the global network of computers) is growing so quickly that it is impossible to know at any given moment the actual number of computers connected to it. IT is even less possible to determine the number of people with access to it. But use of the Internet is clearly growing very, very quickly, and so is computer crime and the need to control it.

Some cyberspace crimes, such as unauthorized access to a computer, are new and specific to the online world. Others, such as

fraud or theft of valuables, are familiar from the real world. In either case, the disembodied, often anonymous nature of activity in cyberspace creates problems in enforcing laws. Evidence, of course, is the foundation for identifying, catching, and prosecuting criminals. Forensic Science has developed well-understood techniques for dealing with real-world evidence, but how can these methods be applied in cyberspace? What must investigators do to collect, preserve, and authenticate digital evidence? How can legal admissibility of digital evidence be assured? How can digital evidence be used to reconstruct crimes and generate leads?

- excerpt from Foreword by Robert L. Dunne, J.D. to Digital Evidence and Computer Crime: Forensic Science, Computers and the Internet by Eoghan Casey