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

Preparation

In terms of preparation, incident response analysts should have the necessary tools at their disposal to acquire host-based evidence. The techniques that will be discussed within this chapter do not rely on any highly specialized technology, but rather on tools that can be acquired for little or no cost. It is critical that the tools that are selected for the acquisition of evidence are those that are provided by reputable sources, have been proven effective by other CSIRT personnel, and have been validated for efficacy prior to use. Outside of software, the only additional hardware that is required is external hard drives and common desktop computers.

When supporting an enterprise environment, it is a good idea for incident response personnel to have a solid understanding of the types of systems that are commonly deployed. For example, in an enterprise that utilizes...