Answer: Computer forensics is a branch of forensic science pertaining to legal evidence found in computers and digital storage mediums. Computer forensics is also known as digital forensics.
The goal of computer forensics is to explain the current state of a digital artifact. The term digital artifact can include a computer system, a storage medium (such as a hard disk or CD-ROM), an electronic document (e.g. an email message or JPEG image) or even a sequence of packets moving over a computer network. The explanation can be as straightforward as "what information is here?" and as detailed as "what is the sequence of events responsible for the present situation?"
There are many reasons to employ the techniques of computer forensics:
- In legal cases, computer forensic techniques are frequently used to analyze computer systems belonging to defendants (in criminal cases) or litigants (in civil cases).
- To recover data in the event of a hardware or software failure.
- To analyze a computer system after a break-in, for example, to determine how the attacker gained access and what the attacker did.
- To gather evidence against an employee that an organization wishes to terminate.
- To gain information about how computer systems work for the purpose of debugging, performance optimization, or reverse-engineering.
