Emerging Careers - Six-Digit Salaries for Cyber-Cops Beating Hackers at Their Own Game Essay

Emerging careers - Six-digit salaries for Cyber-cops beating hackers at their own game
Raluca Băjenaru


Fight aganist criminality is typically imagined as fast-paced, bursting with movement and spectacular, but part of the modern opposition aganist offenders is more of an office-job, retracted from the rough-contact reality to the virtual world, behind the screen of a computer. The so-called „digital detectives” are investigating an emerging field of infractionality that developped together with the advances of information techonology.

Most individuals and companies now prefer to store data on hard drives, thus crimes like identity theft, credit card theft or offences against young people via social-networks are at an all time high, requiring for computer forensic specialists to be trained among the Police and to be hired by law firms, private investigating firms and security companies.
Forensics (the word litteraly means ”to bring to the court”)   is considered to be the process of using scientific knowledge for collecting, analyzing and presenting evidence to the courts.

Revealing bank frauds and snooping into celebrity medical records

Forensics specialists deal with the recovery of latent evidence and analyze how intruders break into an IT infrastructure in order to identify whether additional systems and networks have been compromised. They need proficiency in forensics and reverse-engineering, as well as exploit methodologies. Basically, two types of data are collected from computers - persistent data is the information stored on a local hard drive, for example, which is preserved when the computer is turned off. Volatile data is the data stored in memory which will be lost when the computer loses power or is turned off. This type of data is found in registries, cache, and random access memory and, taking into account its ephemeral nature, it is essential an investigator knows reliable ways to capture it.
A few years ago, computer forensics pros...