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

The cyber kill chain

The timeline that was created as part of the incident investigation provides a view into the sequence of events that the adversary took. This view is useful but does not have the benefit of context for the events. Going back to the RDP example, the analyst can point to the date and time of the connection but lacks insight into at which stage of the attack the event took place. One construct that provides context is placing the events into a kill chain that describes the sequence of events the adversary took to achieve their goal.

The military has used the concept of kill chains to a great extent to describe the process that units must execute to achieve an objective. One version of this concept was outlined in the United States military’s targeting doctrine of Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess (F2T2EA). This process is described as a chain because it allows a defender to disrupt the process at any one step. For example, an adversary that you can...