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

Investigating incidents

The lion's share of this volume addresses the various methods that can be leveraged when investigating an incident. The primary goal of the CSIRT is to utilize methods that follow a systems analysis to address the following key facets of an incident:

  • Identifying the scope: In some incidents, the actual scope may not be clearly defined at the initial detection stage. For example, an organization may be contacted by a law enforcement agency that has indicated a C2 server has been taken down. During an analysis of that system, the external IP address of the organization has been identified. From this data point, the scope is first defined as the entire network. From here, the CSIRT would analyze data from the firewall or web proxy, to identify the internal systems that were found to be communicating with the C2 server. From this data, they would narrow...