-->

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Computer Forensics Salary

More than Your Hard Drive Can Handle!

Today’s world is one where a lot of criminals are steadily becoming more efficient with a computer and making awful use of the resources made available to them, whether it’s extortion, blackmail or just simply theft.

Rightfully so, the field of computer forensics has grown into a lucrative career opportunity with promise of paying you large sums of money. With the right kind of training under your belt, and with some additional IT knowledge, you can be sure to enjoy life with quite the status in society as well as a huge computer forensics salary!

Preventing Cyber Crimes By Learning Computer Forensics Course

Take Up a Computer Forensics Course and Prevent Cyber Crimes!

A lot of criminals and terrorists nowadays have discovered the power of technology as a means of extortion and blackmail. They’ve become quite the resourceful bunch, gaining access to a lot of business and residential networks and retrieving important and private information, causing the loss of billions of dollars.

In this case, crime fighters and law enforcement agencies have looked to certain professionals with an expertise in this field to track down these hackers and cyber thieves, using valuable methods of investigation and scientific research to capture criminals and prevent any possibilities of future crimes.

Getting Paid Huge for Sitting in Front of a PC

Computer Forensics Jobs

If you didn’t know by now, Computer Forensics is fast growing into quite the career field for people interested in technology-based crimes. It has produced a lot of jobs for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the military and large scale corporations and businesses.

Look it up in the local classified ads directory and you’ll see that a lot of opportunities are opening up by a multitude, paralleling that of the rapid increase in computer crimes. Now’s about the best time to find yourself a computer forensics job.

Become An Anti-Cyber Crime Authority

Fight Crimes of Technology with Computer Forensics Training

There is a great demand for people who specialize in computer forensics, especially now that computer based crimes have seen a rapid increase in occurrences over the past decade, quickly one of the most notorious methods of unlawful acts.

A lot of money, probably more than millions of dollars, is lost every year just from the private caches of information being stolen from a network computer, leading to blackmail and extortion.

How To Become A Professional Computer Forensics

Computer Forensics Certification

In order to become a professional computer forensics expert you need to first get a computer forensics certification. This is because the law requires that one must be a certified and recognized expert in order to have their forensic findings accepted during legal proceedings.

In order to pass the certification requirements, you have to make sure that you have all the necessary knowledge and skills. These skills and knowledge can be acquired through training.

Computer Forensics Definition

What’s The Buzz About Computer Forensics?

In case you haven’t heard, Computer forensics is a recently growing profession among IT specialists that aims to serve private and public agencies. IT specialists are named as such due to not only their expertise in computer software, but even hardware issues as well. The forensics aspect of it comes into play when dealing with both ethical and criminal concerns, which would include theft, fraud and misuse of intellectual property.
You have to admit, with the rapid innovations and advancements in technology today, you’d have to start being fearful and concerned about the possibility of a computer crime occurring with you as the victim.

The Field Of Specialty

This field of specialty mainly follows the traditional rules and principles pertaining to scientific investigation. Everything involved in the process requires a systematic approach, with every detail kept well recorded and documented, and ensured that they are within the prohibitions of the law. When it comes to the methodology of things, it all starts out with the identification of several sources as far as digital evidence is concerned.

Then, it is followed by the intention to preserve that evidence from being wiped out, altered or corrupted. You then have to make sure every piece of evidence is thoroughly analyzed and studied, and finally you can present the evidence in an appropriate manner which comes in handy to the situation at hand.

Securing And Protecting The Data/Files

Managing the computer system and making sure that data it contains is kept safe and secure while continuing the protection of any sensitive information or evidence makes an IT specialist a good forensic specialist. Anyone in this field of expertise knows that it has to explore both the computer itself, and the server connections or networks it has any relevance with. It allows an analyst to meticulously study and discover any hidden data, and making sure all sensitive information is well-encrypted by way of a password that’s really hard to decipher, ensuring the company it aims to serve that all data is secured on a well-protected computer system. If any files are deleted, then forensics can easily recover those oh-so important documents which may contain relevant information to the situation. When you look at it in a deeper level, a lot of times IT forensics involve recovering files that have intentionally been deleted from the network, and even from mobile devices.

Any good specialist in this field can recover information on every text message or phone call that has been made, all for the safety and security of the public trust.
Computer forensics has come a long way, and it is a specialty that is here to stay for quite a long time. With a steady growth, you no longer have to worry about your computer and all your information being stolen from right under your nose.

What is Computer Forensics

The Definition Of Computer Forensics

What is computer forensics? - Computer forensics is the generally accepted name that is used by the industry to call the analysis and reporting of the findings of forensic analysis of all computer related and other digital media.

It covers not only Personal Computers, laptops, or server hard drives but also includes other digital storage devices like usb flash drives, digital music players, memory cards, phone SIM cards and data gathered from analyzing a network.

All computer operating systems can be subjected to forensic analysis. This can range from Microsoft’s DOS and Windows operating systems, to MAC and Unix systems as well as the more obscure and esoteric ones. The rule of thumb is that any data stored digitally can be analyzed via forensic methods.

Identifying Source Of Potential Evidence

A lot of electronic devices have memory modules that require continuous power in order to retain the stored information. These data can easily disappear if the power is lost whether by unplugging the power source if it relies on AC power or by letting the battery completely lose its charge. This is why computer forensics experts are very careful to identify these memory modules and determine whether special methods are needed to be implemented in order to completely download the stored data for forensic analysis. This is called identifying the source of potential evidence.

Take for example the case of a standard computer system. A computer consists of a central processing unit, memory storage devices, a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. The system can either function as a standalone unit or be connected to the internet. Computer systems can have dozens of configurations from desktops. Laptops, server racks and even microcomputer systems. They are used for all kinds of computer functions as well data storage.

When doing forensic analysis on a standard computer system, the potential evidence is usually found in files stored in the memory storage devices like hard drives, flash drives and other storage media.
Examples of potential evidence are user created files like address books, email files, audio and video files, digital photographs, calendar entries, internet histories, spreadsheet files and text files. User protected files has a high potential of being a huge source of evidence.

These files are zip files that require a password or encrypted files that need both a private and public key. Most of the time, computer forensics experts devote a lot of their resources towards recovering deleted files from a suspect’s computer. Computer data deletion protocols don’t really completely erase files and computer forensics experts can easily find these deleted files.

This is just a short overview on what is computer forensics. If you wish to learn more about the subject and field, you can do more research in this yourself.