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

An intrusion analysis case study: The Cuckoo’s Egg

There have been very many high-profile incidents in the last 30 years, so finding one that encapsulates a good case study for an incident investigation is not difficult. It may be beneficial to go to the beginning and examine one of the first incident investigations where someone had to create methods of gathering evidence and tracking adversaries across the globe. One aspect of this analysis to keep in mind is that even without a construct, these individuals were able to craft a hypothesis, test it, and analyze the results to come to a conclusion that ultimately helped find the perpetrators.

In August 1986, astronomer and systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkley Laboratory (LBL), Cliff Stoll, was handed a mystery by his supervisor. During a routine audit, the staff at LBL discovered an accounting error by a margin of .75 dollars. At that time, computer resources were expensive. Every amount of computing that was used...