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

Malware analysis overview

Malware analysis, or malware reverse engineering, is a highly technical and specialized field in forensics. Anti-virus and threat intelligence utilizes a highly trained cadre of programmers and forensic personnel who acquire malware from the wild, and then rip it open to determine what it does, how it does it, and who may be responsible for it. This is done utilizing two types of analysis: static and dynamic. Like much of digital forensics, each type of analysis affords some advantages, and incident response analysts should be familiar with both.

An excellent treatment of malware analysis conducted against actual malware found in the wild can be found in Kim Zetter's book Countdown to Zero Day. Comprehensively researched, this book delves deep into the Stuxnet virus, as various research teams attempt to understand what the malware is doing.

An excellent...