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

History of ransomware

Even though a version of malware that encrypts data has been around since the late 1980s, the current explosion in ransomware coincides with the development of cryptocurrency. This is the ability to anonymously send and receive digital currency that has allowed ransomware threat actors to execute attacks and extract payment from their victims while remaining anonymous. Over the past decade, this type of attack has gone through an evolution in terms of sophistication but has largely remained consistent with some core TTPs, such as an initial infection followed by propagating the ransomware and encrypting a user’s files with the intent to extract payment for the decryption key. We will briefly discuss some of the key variants in this evolution, as seen in the following diagram:

Figure 14.1 – A brief history of ransomware

CryptoLocker

The first ransomware attacks took place between September 2013 and May 2014 and utilized...