Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Second Edition

By : Gerard Johansen
Book Image

Digital Forensics and Incident Response - Second Edition

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 second edition will help you perform cutting-edge digital forensic activities and incident response. After focusing on the fundamentals of incident response that are critical to any information security team, you’ll move on to exploring the incident response framework. From understanding its importance to creating a swift and effective response to security incidents, the book will guide you with the help of useful examples. You’ll later get up to speed with digital forensic techniques, from acquiring evidence and examining volatile memory through to hard drive examination and network-based evidence. 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 have learned how to efficiently investigate and report unwanted security breaches and incidents in your organization.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Foundations of Incident Response and Digital Forensics
5
Section 2: Evidence Acquisition
9
Section 3: Analyzing Evidence
15
Section 4: Specialist Topics
Appendix

Analyzing System Memory

For a long time, law enforcement and other organizations performing digital forensic tasks associated with incident investigations often relied on methodologies that focused on evidence contained within the hard drive of a machine. Procedures dictated that the system should be powered down and the hard drive removed for imaging. While this methodology and the associated procedures were effective at ensuring the integrity of the evidence, this overlooked the wealth of information that was contained within the Random Access Memory (RAM), or memory for short, of the targeted system. As a result, incident response analysts began to focus a great deal of attention on ensuring that appropriate methods were employed that maintained the integrity of this evidence, as well as giving them a platform from which to obtain information of evidentiary value.

This chapter...