Computer Forensics: Incident Response Essentials

Chapter 2. Tracking an Offender

In this age of pervasive connectivity, it is unrealistic to expect cyber crime incidents to be isolated to a single system. Like characters in a William Gibson novel, cyber sleuths often have to track offenders across the digital matrix. While the techniques of network forensics are still largely undeveloped, it would be a disservice to devote an entire book to computer forensics without any discussion of Internet methods that you can use to find leads to suspect computers.

When tracking cyber offenders across the Internet, you use many of the same software tools that system and network administrators use to monitor and test network connectivity. Many of these programs are included in modern operating systems, ...