On November 1, South Korea announced its first Digital Evidence process guideline To keep pace with ever increasing cyber crimes.

On the 1st, police and Korea digital forensics society through their joint studies released nation’s first ever ‘Standard Digital Evidence Process Guideline’

Not only worms and hacking but the territory of computer scheme has reached into more serious crimes like murder, rape and fraud. That led to urgency to come up with standard digital evidence guideline to help such investigations. Other leading nations like US and UK already established such guidelines, further indicating how much it is needed for each country.

Cyber crimes are not subject to international boundaries. Combating against cyber crime and high tech crime are evermore needed now, especially on international level. For that reason, apprehending other nation’s handling of digital evidence could reduce that much more legal steps and public notifications domestically.

“To establish solid standards for digital crime investigation, guideline was created. The digital forensics guideline can serve as a clear cut tools for combating cyber-crime investigations. This means both law officials and enforcements can both benefit.” said, Professor Sangjin Lee of the Korea Digital Forensics Society.

Law professor Kun-won Yang of Cyber terror response center stressed, “Leading nations like US and UK has established the standard procedures long ago. However in Asia, Korea’s standard is the first case I believe.” and “With the standard guideline, producing and managing more accurate and clear digital crime evidence is possible now.”

Continued updates through discussion and arguments needed
The latest announcement of Korean forensics guidelines are formed in two sections, a standard for digital evidence processing and digital evidence analyzing procedures.

Police officials released the digital evidence running process guideline but did not reveal nature of the evidence analyzing procedures in order to prevent any loop holes that cyber criminals can penetrate to avoid prosecutions.

Industry analysts point out that the established guidelines should have clear cut procedures to indicate limits of evidence tampering, how evidence is kept and how to manage evidence analyzing environment and evidence lab technician are still need to be looked into and amendments to these should follow on continued basis.

Also, will they use domestically or foreign produced laboratory equipments to analyze evidence? Discussion and arguments regarding adapting Korean standard procedures versus international standard or both is in the works.

“The standard procedure for digital evidence analyzing should be updated on regular base and not just one time. The updates should come from laboratory and institutes and not from investigating agency. Police and prosecutors should continue to fashion a new weapon in their arsenal against criminals” pointed out by Jungsoo Byun of Cyber Terror Response Center.

With the new standard guideline and procedures, accuracy and reliability of Cybercrime investigation should be raised one step above. We only hope for more legal issues and arguments to follow so they can continually challenge the courts to come up with new laws to combat against potential cyber crime and terror in our future.