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

Working with SIEMs

A significant challenge that a great many organizations have is the nature of logging on network devices. With limited space, log files are often rolled over, whereby new log files are written over older log files. The result is that, in some cases, an organization may only have a few days’, or even a few hours’, worth of important logs. If a potential incident happened several weeks ago, the incident response personnel will be without critical pieces of evidence.

One tool that has been embraced by a wide range of enterprises is a SIEM system. This appliance can aggregate log and event data from network sources and combine them into a single location. This allows the CSIRT and other security personnel to observe activity across the entire network, without having to examine individual systems.

The following diagram illustrates how a SIEM system integrates into the overall network:

Figure 12.1 – SIEM and logging architecture...