Our book is not designed as a hacker tracking book, nor as a book designed to tell you about anti-virus or firewall usage. It is, rather, a guide and handbook for those just starting out, or with some experience in the area of Cyber Forensics. If you are already a practicing professional, you may find some of the legal material interesting as a ready reference, but the majority of the technical discussions will not be of the depth for one assuming advanced forensic techniques. We do not, for example, address the topics of hard disk data recovery from offset tracking errors, or peel-back techniques for magnetic recording layer latency. Such is for more advanced texts dealing with the intricacies of such advanced and specific topics. Our goal in this text was to give a starting background into the topics while fostering an emphasis that advanced topics as that just mentioned require specific and expert instruction, and that experts should be consulted rather than tackling such tasks at this level of knowledge.
Additionally, our book is designed for use as an instructional text and reference book. The types of individuals that will benefit from this book are those such as (but not limited to);
·
Internal/external
auditors,
professionals responsible for identifying internal controls (or the lack
thereof), assuring compliance with company policies and procedures, and
establishing appropriate audit trails, which to attest to the failure of
controls and the resulting actions, as they encompass electronic environments.
·
Security
professionals,
who are responsible for establishing appropriate firm-wide controls across all
organization environments, who need the specific tools and techniques discussed
in this book to uncover potential misuses of corporate electronic resources,
gather electronic evidence and analyze electronic audit trails, in an effort to
support company-wide security mandates.
·
Law
enforcement professionals,
responsible for gathering evidence and investigating the misuse of public,
private and governmental computer systems, used as agents in the commission of
illegal activities, collecting evidence of electronic criminal activity to be
used in the prosecution of persons conducting said activities.
·
Human
resource professionals,
professionals, who in a effort to enforce corporate policies and procedures,
with respect to the illegal or misuse of corporate assets (i.e., computing
resources), must ensure that the legal rights and privileges of all employees
are maintained, to be aware of exposures which might result from the inaccurate
collection of evidence, and to protect the organization from liability resulting
from inappropriate handling of employee cases involving the theft or misuse of
corporate assets through the use of electronic means.
A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here's 1K+. As you can see, our book starts out assuming you have little or no knowledge of forensics for computer crime, and serves as a ready reference even as you gain experience.