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The role of technology is ever-increasing in today’s world. The inception of technology has provided some unique opportunities (Sedera & Cooper, 2019) towards creating a modern society but it can also be abused and misused by individuals. The plethora of tools and technologies (Dawson & Omar, 2015) available today that allow criminal acts to occur anywhere in the world serve as an incentive for criminals. The offenses carried out by criminals facilitated by a computer (McMurdie, 2016), computer networks or any other type of information communications technology are known as Digital crimes. It also involves classic crimes (such as murder, blackmailing, kidnaping, defamation), that misuse technological adeptness and accessibility to information. Formerly, criminal investigations revolved around the analysis of physical evidence from the crime scene. Whereas today, in the digital era, the evidence to assay is in an electronic or digital form (Macdermott, Baker, & Shi, 2018) and is called Digital Evidence. Digital evidence is any information related to the crime that is stored or transmitted in digital form. It may comprise of computer-generated log files, browsing history, or metadata and may be accrued from computer systems, smart digital devices, or network traffic.
The mechanism required to obtain and analyze digital evidence to solve criminal cases is called Digital Forensics (Årnes, 2017; Sammons, 2015). It is a new and fast-growing form of investigative practice wherein the forensic specialists use modern forensic software tools to capture and examine digital evidence. Experts in digital forensic investigation are facing unseen challenges due to the new, advanced technologies, used in digital devices, and adopted by criminals alike. The evidence in many cases is not sufficient to narrow down suspects. The difficulties can be overcome through a hybrid digital forensic task process (Rahman & N. A. Khan, 2016) that incorporates other dimensions like behavioural clues of the offender into the traditional DF process.
The discovery and examination of behavioural clues of the offender and the victim from digital evidence is known as Behavioural Evidence Analysis (BEA) (Turvey, 2016; Turvey & Esparza, 2016). BEA is beneficial for creating a profile of the criminals based on their offense behaviour and establishing a strong evidence base for similar crimes in future. This way it can help in focusing on an investigation with speed and in the right direction, and in predicting the offender’s behaviour and motivation (Turvey, 2016). These results can further facilitate narrowing down a suspect’s behaviour by mapping it to a criminal profile thus assisting in elimination of suspects.
The existing literature only offers a customary description of the techniques of BEA, and its usefulness in investigating digital crimes. Despite the recognized efficacy of BEA, there exists no standard technique for the practical incorporation of BEA in solving real life criminal cases. Moreover, the models designed previously are constrained by the specific characteristic of the forensic domain being dealt with, limiting their use to particular categories of crime. This paper attempts to address these discovered gaps in the literature in several ways.