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

Registry analysis

There is a great deal of activity that occurs under the hood on the Windows operating system. One place that this activity occurs and is documented is in the Windows Registry. The Windows Registry is a database that stores the low-level system settings for the Windows operating system. This includes settings for devices, security, services, and the storage of user account security settings in the Security Accounts Manager (SAM).

The registry is made up of two elements. The first is the key. The key is a container that holds the second element the values. These values hold specific settings information. The highest-level key is called the root key and the Windows operating system has five root keys, all of which are stored on the disk in the registry hives. These registry hives are located in the %SystemRoot%\system32\config folder on the Windows file...