Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Third Edition

By : Gerard Johansen
5 (1)
Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Gerard Johansen

Overview of this book

An understanding of how digital forensics integrates with the overall response to cybersecurity incidents is key to securing your organization’s infrastructure from attacks. This updated third edition will help you perform cutting-edge digital forensic activities and incident response with a new focus on responding to ransomware attacks. After covering the fundamentals of incident response that are critical to any information security team, you’ll explore incident response frameworks. From understanding their importance to creating a swift and effective response to security incidents, the book will guide you using examples. Later, you’ll cover digital forensic techniques, from acquiring evidence and examining volatile memory through to hard drive examination and network-based evidence. You’ll be able to apply these techniques to the current threat of ransomware. As you progress, you’ll discover the role that threat intelligence plays in the incident response process. You’ll also learn how to prepare an incident response report that documents the findings of your analysis. Finally, in addition to various incident response activities, the book will address malware analysis and demonstrate how you can proactively use your digital forensic skills in threat hunting. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to investigate and report unwanted security breaches and incidents in your organization.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations of Incident Response and Digital Forensics
6
Part 2: Evidence Acquisition
11
Part 3: Evidence Analysis
17
Part 4: Ransomware Incident Response
20
Part 5: Threat Intelligence and Hunting
Appendix

Preparing a staging drive

Just as important as learning how to handle the evidence drive, having a forensically sound stage drive to which evidence will be imaged is critical. Responders will be walked through how to prepare this item.

Beyond having the necessary hardware and software to perform forensic imaging, it is critical to pre-stage a location to hold the image or evidence file. For incident response teams, the best thing to utilize as an evidence repository is an external USB or FireWire disk drive. This allows a degree of portability as incident responders may have to investigate an incident offsite or at a variety of locations without the benefit of a forensic laboratory.

There are two tasks that need to be performed on evidence drives prior to their use. The first is to ensure that the repository is free of any data. Incident response teams should have a policy and procedure that dictate that an evidence drive be wiped prior to each use. This includes drives that...