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

YARA

One tool that has made its way from the malware analysis community into threat intelligence is YARA. This open source tool is often compared to the Linux GREP command for its ability to parse through large amounts of data and indicate if there are matching strings or data patterns. What the acronym YARA stands for is the subject of friendly debate with some going with YARA: Another Recursive Acronym or the author’s preferred Yet Another Ridiculous Acronym. Nomenclature aside, the YARA tool’s ability to act as a Swiss Army knife for incident responders and malware research also has functionality that analysts can leverage.

The YARA tool is maintained by VirusTotal and comes in two components. The first of these is a scanning tool. This tool, written in Python, is the engine that scans files such as memory dumps, disk images, or suspected malicious executables for matching indicators. Due to the tool being open source, along with its capabilities, third-party tools...