Computer Forensics and Analytical Measures in the Age of Big Data

This research is anchored on computer forensics and its preventive measures in the age of big data. The computing and storage capacity in the age of Information Technology has made the growth of digital data accelerating at unprecedented and virtually incomprehensible rate. This big data revolution has opened up new opportunities in various fields. Big data is an invaluable tool in digital forensic investigation. The availability of big datasets can be helpful in some scenarios; but it also introduces new challenges in investigations. The existing open source and proprietary tools and infrastructures have limited scope and cannot meet the expected response time to investigate on big dataset. Cyber Forensics investigators face challenges in identifying the relevant evidences from a big dataset, collecting, analyzing those evidence and reconstruct past events. In this paper, we propose the definition of big data forensics and analytically analyze the big data forensics domain to explore the challenges in digital forensics paradigm. We propose a conceptual model to associate big data forensics investigations and provide new insights to investigate criminal incidents.