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

NetFlow

First designed by Cisco Systems in 1996, NetFlow is a feature found in network devices such as switches and routers that allows network administrators to monitor traffic within the network. NetFlow is not strictly a security tool but it does provide a good deal of data to incident responders in the event of an incident. NetFlow is sent by network devices via the UDP protocol to a central collection point, often called the NetFlow Collector.

In a security context, NetFlow provides deep insights into the internal traffic of systems as they communicate with each other. This is often referred to as east-west traffic, as opposed to north-south traffic, which is used to describe internal systems communicating with external systems through the perimeter firewall. For example, the following diagram shows a simple network. In a real-world scenario, an attacker may compromise a system on the 10.10.2.0/24 subnet. From there, they may attempt to pivot to a file server on the 10.10.1...