Digital crime detection is increasingly becoming the center of discussions in many forums across the world. The rise of cybercrimes today demands from computer specialists to create mitigation platform to deal with digital security threats when they occur. To achieve this, computer scientists use digital forensic tools for digital crime detection. Digital forensic tools come in varied forms and nature. As a result, every set of digital forensic tools has distinctive features. However, forensic tools come in two major categories, the hardware, and software tools. Hardware tools are tangible computer components whereas software tools are intangible applications used for forensic investigations.
Characteristically, digital forensic tools have different features based on their intended purpose and developers. Different developers design tools using different technologies making them unique to their brands (Rogers, 2012). However, irrespective of the developers, the tools still achieve the same purpose of detecting the past and present activities of a computer system. In the process, they indicate any anomalies and criminal activities that might have occurred. For example, the SAN SIFT forensic tool leverages the VMware computer forensics (Rogers, 2012). It supports advanced forensic format and RAW DD among other forensic image formats including Expert Witness File.
Internet analysis tools, file analysis tools, mobile devices forensic tools, network forensic tools, and database analysis tools are some of the digital forensic tools used for digital crime detection (Shenoi, 2014). Mobile device forensic tools are mainly used to carry out forensic audit and analysis on mobile phone devices, whereas internet analysis tools are used for internet crime detection. Mobile forensic tools such as oxygen forensic suite are common in the market (Shenoi, 2014). On the other hand, database analysis tools come in handy when digging for forensic evidence in a computer database.
Among the tools mentioned above, database analysis tools, file analysis tools, and network analysis tools are the most important to an investigator. Analysis of the database, log files, and the network system would give a comprehensive view of activities that occurred in a server. On the other hand, the internet analysis tools and the mobile device analysis tools are the most important to me.
- Rogers, M. K. (2012). Digital forensics and cyber crime: Third International ICST Conference, ICDF2C 2011, Dublin, Ireland, October 26-28, 2011, revised selected papers. Berlin: Springer.
- Shenoi, S. (2014). Advances in digital forensics X: 10th IFIP WG 11.9 International Conference, Vienna, Austria, January 8-10, 2014, Revised selected pap
