Defend I.T.: Security by Example

Chapter 15. Executive Fraud

The readers of this book will surely be aware of the recent outbreak of corporate fraud and accounting scandals within the executive ranks at major U.S. corporations. Enron, Tyco, AOL Time Warner, WorldCom (and these are real names now) are just the more well-known cases, and not by any means an exhaustive list. Well, we can say with some degree of satisfaction that computer security professionals do at least have a role to play in identifying, proving, and stopping this type of fraud.

This case study details the computer forensic procedures utilized to support a large-scale corporate fraud investigation aimed at many senior executives of an international company who were accused of fraudulently increasing corporate ...