In order to create awareness about the digital forensics, Indiaforensic offers the series of articles on the subject of digital forensic and its applications. An increasing number of forensic accountants are developing specializations and are obtaining the CFAP credentials. Indiaforensic enables CFAPs to gain a sound understanding of forensic and technology issues through these credentials and the resources related to the bodies of knowledge. In fact, when viewed in combination, CFAP credentials provide a very broad structure encompassing forensic accounting techniques and pertinent information technology skills.
What Is Digital Forensics?
The use of scientifically derived and proven methods toward the preservation, collection, validation, identification, analysis, interpretation, documentation and presentation of digital evidence derived from digital sources for the purpose of facilitating or furthering the reconstruction of events. The tools and methods are scientific and are verified scientifically, but their use necessarily involves elements of ability, judgment and interpretation. Digital media comes in many forms, including the hard drives found in personal computers, external drives, telephones, smartphones, PDAs and telephone voice mail systems. Digital forensics assignments typically are performed to determine what activity took place on a particular device by a user or to restore previously deleted or corrupted data. Digital forensics engagement commonly is performed during a fraud investigation because the results can provide a direction as to what the suspects involved in the fraudulent act are likely to know, when they were likely to know it, the documents to which they had access, actions taken on these documents [eg: copied on the pen drives or deleted from the email box], with whom they communicated, and whether they appeared to try to hide their actions. The Internet history, web-based email, lost or deleted files, logging and registry files are examples of data the forensic accountant can utilize as evidence in their engagements by using the digital forensic techniques.
