Digital Forensics: Pursuing A Master's Degree

713 Words3 Pages

This area of computer science interest me because I want to fight crime on a cyber-level. My area of study is Computer Science, and later I hope to become knowledgeable in Network Security as my career. I plan to pursue a Master’s Degree that will place me on the path to this profession. One of the main reasons why this topic interest me is because of the excitement that it brings. This excitement is to me an adrenaline rush, as if I was jumping out of a plane at 1000 feet. Cyber criminals do not care about anything but themselves and try to steal, disrupt, or even damage digital systems or information just because they can. After these criminals are finished doing what it is they do, their next goal is to completely destroy any information …show more content…

As the world becomes more digital, the use of people to decrypt information from these sources are becoming very important. Digital Forensics is becoming so popular that the NIST is starting to develop a national standard on how to collect digital evidence. (NIST 2014) I believe that with the way that programs such as DOD shredders are distributed on the internet it is becoming harder and harder for information to be reconstructed. A DOD shredder from my current knowledge of using them on my computer, just to try one out, deletes information over and over again so that there is almost nothing left to retrieve on your computer about whatever it is that you deleted. So to clarify, information is stored in several places on your computer, the Hard Drive (HD), Random Access Memory (RAM), Central Processing Unit (CPU), and Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). Out of all these areas that your computer is able to store information, the Hard Drive is the primary source of the more permanent storage. As you save information onto the HD the information is place in a location on a very thin disk inside the HD, then this location is documented so that the CPU can find it later on. When you delete this information from the HD that slot on the dish in the HD is now open so that new information can be stored there. The problem with deleting information is that there is always information still available, clusters that are able to be retrieved after being deleted, so sometimes information can be collected even after it is deleted. What a shredder does is takes that point where the information is saved and deletes it several times so that