Forensic Analytics, 2nd Edition

Introduction

IT WAS THE BEST of crimes, it was the worst of crimes. We live in an age of electronic data processing where the clever use of a computer no longer means that we need an ingenious heist pulled off by an organized gang of 17 people to steal £2.5 million from a train some 50 miles north of London (the 1963 great train robbery). In August 2018 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent a confidential alert to various banks telling them that they had information that cyber criminals were planning to conduct “a global Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cash-out scheme in the coming days.” The alert speculated that the scheme was most likely associated with a card issuer breach. This is a twenty-first century version of a bank heist in which the criminals do not wear ski masks, do not threaten a teller, and do not set foot in a vault. Our new electronic age gives people, including employees and vendors, the opportunity to steal large amounts of money electronically.

Greek mythology gives us one of the first recorded cases of theft where Prometheus steals fire for human use and is severely punished by Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods. In those times the legal system wasn't terribly overloaded, and the punishments handed out were quite harsh, such as being bound to a rock for eternity. This deterred many others that were not tied to rocks from pulling off similar stunts. Prometheus wasn't an employee as such, and so we must go east and over the Euphrates to Mesopotamia ...