Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 8
Digital forensics education, training and awareness
The forensic process should be enhanced with security mechanisms which would 
upgrade the post-incident reaction to real time. The real-time acquisition tools should 
have capabilities of capturing activity of all the wireless point within a respectable 
distance.
Anti-forensics is a reality that comes with every serious crime and involves tac-
tics for “safe hacking” and keeps the crime sophistication in a high level. Computer 
forensic investigators along with the forensic software developers should start paying 
more attention to anti-forensics tools and approaches.
If we consider the computer forensics as the actions of collection, preservation, iden-
tification and presentation of evidence, anti-forensics can affect the first three stages. 
Because these stages can be characterized as “finish to start” between them from a proj-
ect management point of view, the failure of one of them could end up as a failure of the 
lot. Thus, there is a high impact of anti-forensics to the forensics investigations.
Officially there is no such thing as anti-forensic investigations because the anti-
forensic countermeasures are still part of the investigator’s skills.
THE MAIN DIFFICULTIES FACED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT 
OFFICERS FIGHTING CYBER-CRIME
It is evident that cybercrime is no longer in its infancy. It is “big business” for the 
criminal entrepreneur with potentially lots of money to be made with minimal risks. 
At the same time the main areas which have been recognized as the contributory ele-
ments in the failing by law enforcement officers are as follows:
• Lack of up-to-date guidelines
• Lack of proper training
• Lack of funding
The UK law enforcement cannot investigate all alleged offences, which then raises a 
question as to how decisions are made, as to which cases to investigate and which not 
to investigate, because of the scale and the international nature of these crimes. How 
much of the public interest is taken into consideration and is it another way of dealing 
with e-crime irrespective of how ineffective and discouraging it appears?
From law enforcement point of view the task of fighting cyber-crime is a dif-
ficult one. Although crime is irrespective of how big or small it is, a decision has to 
be made on the merits of each case as to whether investigating and prosecuting is in 
the public’s interest. In April 2007, a decision was made that all credit card fraud 
should be reported to the banks and not directly to the police. The banks can then 
decide which ones to refer to the police for investigation. It is recognized that not all 
cases will have sufficient evidence and with the limited resources available to law 
enforcement this ensures that resources are allocated where they are required the 
most (
ACPO Guidelines, 2009
). This is not seen as a very good decision especially 
by politicians and one of the reasons given for this is that it prevents the acquisition 
of accurate statistics on e-crime. This was indeed never possible due to the fact that 
not all e-crimes are reported.

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