Electronic Evidence: A Framework for Applying Digital Forensics to Data Base

Abstract

ABSTRACT Accounting data bases contain much information reflecting a company’s financial performance, clients, suppliers, and other relevant information about the company’s activities. Thus, attracting criminal activity is empowered by a wide range of new and evolving digital technologies. More interestingly, all of these electronic media create digital traces, providing useful information for the digital investigation process. As digital crime targeting millions of pieces of sensitive information from data bases is rising, specific expertise and an informed approach in data base forensics are required. This study suggests an enhanced meta-framework, named data base evidence finding investigation (DEFI), to investigate an accounting data base to detect tampering. DEFI offers more targeted and streamlined guidance for data base experts to perform investigations while preserving the digital evidence's integrity and leaving it unchanged. Using an example, we demonstrate that the proposed enhanced meta-framework can guide the detection of suspicious transactions in an accounting data base.