Understanding the basic concepts of forensics

Forensics is used by the police when they are investigating crimes and need to find as much evidence as they can to secure a conviction. We will be looking at computer and web-based attacks. There are many different components, therefore we will look at each of these in turn:

• Order of volatility: You are a fireman and you arrive at a house and you can only save one person at a time and there are two items inside. The first is a snowman, and the second is a rib of beef; the fireman now has the dilemma, which one shall he choose? He saves the snowman first as it is melting and has decided to let the rib of beef cook some more so that the firemen can have a nice supper! So, when we look for order of volatility, we are looking to secure the most perishable evidence first. We do not try and stop the attack until we have secured the volatile evidence so that the source can be identified. This is known as order of volatility:
  • Example 1—web-based attack...