3 Effective Tips

If you're interested at computer programming and solving white-collar crimes - introducing computer forensics (CF), a field of study that requires those mentioned skills earlier in order to retrieve lost data from crime suspects' computers and other digital devices as court evidence.

It has a specific study route that you can choose various CF certifications including:

· GIAC Certified Forensics Analyst (GCFA)

· Certified Computer Examiner (CCE)

· Certified Computer Forensic Examiner (CFCE)

· Encase Certified Examiner (EnCE)

· AccessData Certified Examiner (ACE)

No matter which certifications you choose, you have to get pass your certification in order to become a certified computer forensics investigator - how?

Tip No.1: Develop a test taking strategy

As if you're given questions or problems regarding a case study, try hard to delve into the problem - most of the questions are analytical questions and you need more time for your test preparation. Don't expect that you can get free test preparation questions online.

Therefore, you can search for it via Amazon.com or any online bookstores. If you have received those preparation questions from companies that offer such certifications, make use of your time and effort to get those questions done on time. You have to try requesting for such items from these companies as they might provide related resources for their candidates.

Tip No.2: Polish your report writing skills

Answering analytical-type questions can be very technical. Hence, you need to tone down your technical approach so that your report suits all kind of readers including your examiners, or other groups of people that do not have computer forensics background. If you have poor writing skills, please don't hesitate to look for an English tutor - that would be the best investment for your career planning.

Besides that, answering questions as well as your report have to be precisely written - of course, without grammar errors. Thus, you have to construct a plan before writing your report. You have to develop a habit of proof-reading your report.

Tip No.3: Avoid procrastination - form a study group or look for a study partner

Most practical test consists of analytical questions and report writing and you need to allocate enough time to answer all the questions. By forming a study group or a study partner, you can concentrate on revising what you've learned in your computer forensics certification training course. If you couldn't find a study partner from your area - try finding one by posting a notice via free online classifieds such as Craigslist.org. This is also a way of looking for former CF certificate holders as your study partner.

Scottish Ancestors

More and more people are becoming interested in their family history and trying to trace their ancestors to see where they lived and what they did. Over 100 years ago many families tended to stay in the same area of a country be it Scotland or anywhere else but in these modern times families tend to be constantly moving not just around one country but from one country to another and so trying to trace your family tree can become a bit more complicated.

If you stay in the US, Canada, Australia or anywhere else in the world and whilst researching your family tree you come across a Scottish ancestor do not despair for there are lots of different ways you can try to find out more about them. Most of these research techniques have only recently became available thanks to the wonders of science and the internet.

One of the most obvious places to start your research is to use Google to see if the name of your ancestor yields any useful results. This simple search could yield a variety of information on your Scottish ancestor if you are lucky including newspaper articles, ship passenger lists, old photographs or even family websites set up by distant cousins who have became interested in genealogy and posted their findings online.

Not everyone is lucky however using Google but then there are lots of other sites such as Ancestry, Genesreunited and One Great Family that you can use to see if parts of your family tree have already been researched. These sites can save you a lot of time and energy as well as putting you in contact with distant relations. It is always quite interesting to see how far traveled your family tree is.

If you are looking to view Scottish birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates or census information then Scotlandspeople is the best site to visit. Scotlandspeople has over 80 million records and is the official government site for Scottish genealogical data. Information and records are constantly being added to the site and only recently they added Catholic Parish Registers and more family records are expected to be added in the coming year.

Online forums such as Rootschat and the ones at Ancestry and Genesreunited are a great way of discussing any problems you encounter with other family genealogists many of whom will have encountered similar issues in the past and may be able to offer you suggestions on how to overcome your problem.

As interest in genealogy continues to grow through programs such as Who DO You Think You Are? then more and more historical data will be unearthed and made available online to meet the demand. Ancestry have made a lot of military records and documentation online and other sites are scanning newspapers and all sorts of other document which contain information which would be of use to genealogists in their search to trace their ancestors whether they be Scottish or not and so although Scotland may be miles away from where you stay the information is all available at the touch of a button.

Forensics Career

Computer Forensics is a field that continues to grow in record numbers year after year. As computer technology becomes ever more ubiquitous, the effectiveness and relevancy of this specialization becomes more useful in criminal cases. Common crimes that are investigated using computer forensics are: identity theft, online fraud, embezzlement, child pornography, and hacker activity. The amount of identity theft, unethical activity, and embezzlement going on in the white color business world becomes more sophisticated, which makes this particular aspect of computer forensics more relevant in today's world.

So, lets back up a step and give you a basic definition of what computer forensics is all about. Computer Forensics analysts gather digital evidence that can be used in a court of law. They spend their time gathering particular incriminating evidence from computers, and other devices such as PDA's and cell phones. Individuals in this career may have different sub specialties, but the end goal is usually the same and that is to gather evidence to support a case.

Typical Duties For Computer Forensics Analysts

On a typical day, you may spend time searching through files, looking for keywords or dates of interest where activity relating to the alleged crime may have occurred. You may also need to search through Internet history files to find out For example, if you are looking for evidence of the consumption of child pornography, you may need to search through historical data on their Internet usage, including deleted pictures, files, or emails that might include incriminating evidence. If you find that they have been visiting known sites that convey this material, it can be used in your official findings or downloaded to a disk for evidence in a court of law.

Child pornography is just one of many uses of Computer Forensic Analysts. Law enforcement agencies need to have these tech savvy, specially trained individuals on staff in order to find evidence of other cyber crimes as well. You may spend a day investigating a ring of identity theft victims who have fallen victim through phishing scams or other related attempts to gain sensitive bank account information. Some of these operations may have several people involved in identity theft rings. Tracing IP addresses, which provides locations where a computer being used in the scam is a common practice. This information can then be passed to the law enforcement officers in the field to obtain a warrant and confiscate computers at a particular residence or place of business. Computer Forensics is also used widely in violent crimes and homicide cases where emails or files on a computer can be used to incriminate a suspect.

Employment & Career Options

Most individuals work in either a law enforcement office such as a local police department or the FBI. Another option is to find employment with a private computer forensics agency. The FBI has a team named CART, which stands for Computer Analysis and Response Team, which has a primary function of computer forensics tasks related to large national level cases. It is common in these types of cases for a suspect and a victim to reside in other states, due to the nature of the Internet. It is for this reason that FBI agencies work closely with local law enforcement offices in an effort to solve cases and gather evidence.

Others may choose to work in private firms, which are often contracted with to monitor criminal activity that may be going on inside a large corporation. Common examples of crimes investigated in large companies range from embezzlement to sexual harassment cases. Where there is a will to commit crime through the use of computer technology, there is a need for a trained computer forensics analyst to solve the crime.

Mean by Computer

The term forensics is often associated with the tangible objects that became part of a crime. But since law-breaking is no longer limited to delinquent acts but have been embraced by the machines as well, there is now a term called computer forensics.

This is investigating and analyzing through the use of computers to get legal evidences. This is in relation to the computer-related crimes that are now possible such as theft of intellectual property, fraud, and so many others. The experts on this field have a wide array of techniques that can recover the deleted files, decrypt codes, or retrieve the damaged information in the machine. However, before you become one of the computer forensics specialists, it is important that you know the ins and outs of both computer hardware and software since you would not deal on data inside the computer alone.

The experts in computer forensics ensure that as much as possible, no evidence will be compromised while they are still investigating the crime. Moreover, they should have the ability to prevent malware infection while they are under the process of investigation. They are also responsible for keeping all the information private especially if it is related to the details regarding an attorney and a client. These are just some of the responsibilities of a machine forensics expert.

Various steps are taken when identifying and retrieving the evidences that may exist on the system. Aside from protecting it from any damage, alteration or viruses, it is also important that they recover all the files even those that were already deleted. In case there are also files protected by data security, encrypting these data is also part of the process as well. All of the things that they will discover on the computer system must be printed at the same time after they have finished the analysis.

Internet Addresses

All computers attached to an IP network (such as the Internet) are uniquely identified by a 32-bit number, usually expressed in decimal notation and with each byte (or octet) separated by a period. Because each portion of the address specifies two bits, the decimal range is between 0 and 255 for each of the four bytes. For example:

10.191.31.10

If you ever see an IP address expressed in decimal notation with a number ING higher than 255, the address is not a valid IP address.

This address must be unique to the specific computer to which it is assigned- no other computer can have this address if it is attached to the same internetwork (i.e., the Internet). If two computers ever do have the same address, unpredictable routing errors will result. IP addresses are analogous to house addresses in that no two are ever the same and each element (in the case of house addresses, elements would be states, cities, streets, and numbers) is increasingly specific.

Subnets

IP addresses are not simply assigned at random. All computers on the same data link network are within the same subnet, or range of IP addresses. For instance, if you have an office Ethernet of 25 computers, all 25 computers would have IP addresses within the same short range.

The following example explains how IP addresses are assigned and how networks are submitted, or divided into IP networks. Let's say that BT&T. a telephone company and Internet service provider (ISP), has been assigned th 10 address range. Within that range, BT&T is able to split up and sell ranges of IP addresses.

Now let's say that American Internet, a regional ISP that serves the east coast, purchases from BT&T high-capacity network connections and the right: to act as a second-tier Internet service provider. BT&T assigns the 191 range of its 10 address range to American Internet, which is now free to assign any addresses more specific than 10. 191.

Digital Widgets, a small company that makes a digital version of the ubiquitous widget and has 200 computers, leases a Ti service and the ability to assign its own IP addresses within the company from American Internet. American Internet gives Digital Widgets the 64 address range so that Digital Widgets is free to assign any IP address more specific than 10.191. 64 to their own computers.

Sara, the forward-thinking network administrator of Digital Widgets, assigns the IP addresses 10.191.64.1 to the router attached to the Ti line. She assigns the address 10. 191.64.2 to the corporate server and sets up DHCP on the server to automatically assign the remaining addresses to client computers as they attach to the network.

DHCP is a protocol that dynamically assigns IP addresses to clients as they request them. DHCP is explained in the last section of this article

When Sara boots her networked client computer, it automatically receives the IP address 10.191.64.3 because it was the first computer to request a DHCP lease.