Book Image

Learning Network Forensics

By : Samir Datt
Book Image

Learning Network Forensics

By: Samir Datt

Overview of this book

We live in a highly networked world. Every digital device—phone, tablet, or computer is connected to each other, in one way or another. In this new age of connected networks, there is network crime. Network forensics is the brave new frontier of digital investigation and information security professionals to extend their abilities to catch miscreants on the network. The book starts with an introduction to the world of network forensics and investigations. You will begin by getting an understanding of how to gather both physical and virtual evidence, intercepting and analyzing network data, wireless data packets, investigating intrusions, and so on. You will further explore the technology, tools, and investigating methods using malware forensics, network tunneling, and behaviors. By the end of the book, you will gain a complete understanding of how to successfully close a case.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Network Forensics
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Analyzing network logs using Splunk


Now that we have the logs, it is high time we understood how to collect and analyze them from a network forensic's perspective.

The tool of choice is Splunk. This is a very versatile tool (it also has a free version) that offers users the ability to collect log files from multiple sources, index and normalize the data within, then carry out an in-depth analysis to look for anomalies, prepare reports, and visualize the results. Lets take a look at it:

Splunk offers the facility to import and index data in a multitude of formats. This includes structured data, web services, network devices, Microsoft servers, application services, the cloud, and a host of others. The following are the steps to download and start using Splunk:

  1. To get started, we need to download Splunk from http://www.splunk.com/, as shown in the following screenshot:

  2. All we need to get started is to download the relevant binary based on the operating system that we intend to use for the analysis...