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

Summary

In many ways, this chapter just scratches the surface of what information can be found by leveraging disk forensic tools. The exploration of a disk image by Autopsy demonstrated some of the features that are available to responders. From here, extracting other data stores such as the Windows Registry and MFT were explored to provide responders with an idea of what data is available during an incident analysis.

Specific tools and techniques are largely dependent on the tool that's utilized. What's important to understand is that modern operating systems leave traces of their activity all over the disk, from file change evidence in the MFT to registry key settings when new user accounts are added. Incident responders should have expertise in understanding how modern operating systems store data and how to leverage commercial or freeware tools to find this data...