An analytical analysis of Turkish digital forensics

The first glimpses of digital forensics (DF) starts back in 1970's, mainly financial frauds, with the widespread use of computers. The evolution of information technologies and their wider use made the digital forensics evolve and flourish. Digital forensics passed a short but complex way of “Ad-Hoc”, “Structured” and “Enterprise” phases nearly in four decades. The national readiness of countries might vary for those phases depending on the economy, legislation, adoption level, expertise and other factors. Today digital forensics discipline is one of the major issues of law enforcement (LE), government, defense, industry, academics, justice and other non-governmental organizations as stakeholders have to deal with. We wanted to assess the maturity level of “Turkish Digital Forensics” in view of the digital forensics historical phases, along with some specific institutional & organizational digital forensics issues. The current digital forensic capacity and ability, understanding and adoption level of the discipline, education and training forecasts, current organizational digital forensics framework and infrastructure, expertise, certification and knowledge gained/needed by digital forensics community, tools and SW-HW used in digital forensics, national legislation, policy making and standardization issues along with the anticipated requirements for near future are aimed to address by an online survey. This paper discusses the aforementioned national issues with respect to the digital forensics discipline. It does not examine all aspects of digital forensics. The general assessment we had reached for the maturity level of “National DF” is in between the structured and enterprise phases, with a long way to go but with promising developments.