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

Memory analysis overview

When discussing how to analyze the memory of a system, two terms are used interchangeably. The terms RAM and memory are used to describe the portion of the computer’s internal systems where the operating system places data utilized by applications and the system hardware while that application or hardware is in use. What makes RAM or memory different from storage is the volatile nature of the data. Often, if the system is shut down, the data will be lost.

One change in operating systems that has had a direct impact on memory analysis is the advent of the 64-bit OS. The use of a 64-bit register allows the OS to reference a total of 17,179,869,184 GB of memory. When compared to the 32-bit OS, this is several million times the amount of data previously available. As a result, there is a good deal of data contained within RAM at the time a system is running that is valuable in incident investigation. This includes the following:

  • Running processes...