What is digital crime?

Let's suppose that a criminal breaks into a bank to steal the money in the safe, and in another case an attacker somehow hacked into the bank's private network and transferred money to his account. Both of these are targeting the monetary assets of the company.

In the first case, if an investigator needs to track a criminal, they would apply their investigation skills to the crime scene. They would track the attacker's fingerprints and activities to finally get a clear idea about what happened and identify the criminal. In the second scenario, the investigator needs to track the criminal's digital traces on the local system, the network, and even through the Internet in order to understand the criminal's activities, and this may uncover their digital identity.

In an ordinary crime, the investigator needs to find the crime's motivation and target. In cybercrime, the investigator needs to know the malicious code—the weapon—that the attacker used in conducting their crime, the vulnerability exploited to compromise the digital system, and the size of the damage. In the same way, we can apply the same investigation mechanisms to digital crime after taking into consideration the different nature of assets and attacks.

There are various targets of digital crime. These start from harassment to stealing credit cards and money online, to espionage between countries or big companies; as we recently saw there were some famous and aggressive malware programs and attacks that were thought to be developed with nation-level support against other nations, targeting some infrastructure or sensitive information. Also, these attacks that were targeted at some famous companies in different fields led to information and data leakage.

For these reasons, investing in securing the assets in their digital form has gained great importance in the last decade in both governmental and private sectors. One branch of the information security process is digital forensics.