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

Setting up a malware sandbox

One consideration when analyzing malware is how to handle malware in a safe environment without accidentally infecting your system. The malware sandbox is a controlled environment where analysts can perform both static and dynamic analysis of malware without the risk of infecting a production system. In this case, we will look at two types of sandboxes; the local sandbox allows analysts to configure a system that is entirely under their control, while the cloud-based option allows analysts to leverage dynamic analysis.

Local sandbox

A local sandbox is a system that has been configured with settings and tools in which an analyst can examine malware in a controlled environment. One technique to configure a local sandbox is the use of a virtualization hypervisor such as Virtual Box or VMWare and configuring an operating system on top. There are key advantages to using virtualization for the sandbox. We have already addressed the first: if the analyst...