Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response

By : Gerard Johansen
Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response

By: Gerard Johansen

Overview of this book

Digital Forensics and Incident Response will guide you through the entire spectrum of tasks associated with incident response, starting with preparatory activities associated with creating an incident response plan and creating a digital forensics capability within your own organization. You will then begin a detailed examination of digital forensic techniques including acquiring evidence, examining volatile memory, hard drive assessment, and network-based evidence. You will also explore the role that threat intelligence plays in the incident response process. Finally, a detailed section on preparing reports will help you prepare a written report for use either internally or in a courtroom. By the end of the book, you will have mastered forensic techniques and incident response and you will have a solid foundation on which to increase your ability to investigate such incidents in your organization.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Evidence volatility


Not all evidence on a host system is the same. Volatility is used to describe how data on a host system is maintained after changes such as log-offs or power shutdowns. Data that will be lost if the system is powered down is referred to as volatile data. Volatile data can be data in the CPU, routing table, or ARP cache. One of the most critical pieces of volatile evidence is the memory currently running on the system. When investigating such incidents as malware infections, the memory in a live system is of critical importance. Malware leaves a number of key pieces of evidence within the memory of a system and, if lost, can leave the incident response analyst with little or no avenue to investigate.

Non-volatile data is the data that is stored on a hard drive and will usually persist after shut down. Non-volatile data includes Master File Table (MFT) entries, registry information, and the actual files on the hard drive. While malware creates evidence in memory, there are...