Digital Forensics

What is Digital Forensics?

Digital Forensics is the “process of identifying, preserving, analyzing and presenting digital evidence in a manner that is legally acceptable in any legal proceedings such at a court of law, or valid with the proof being documented, to use in an official way.

It describes a scientific investigation process in which computer artifacts, data, and information are collected around a Cyber Attack.

Why do you need it and why it’s important?

In a series of attacks, your network is penetrated and the attackers might have installed a payload that damages your company’s reputation. Imagine that other chained attacks would result in the destruction of valuable intellectual capital and digital assets resident in your systems and networks.

For businesses that hold customer data, digital forensics is important. If there has been a Cyber Attack, the digital artifacts and evidence should be preserved immediately for an effective investigation to take place. Should you get breached, in order to report an incident, you need to seek Digital Forensics for such a purpose. An important point to note is that a digital forensic investigation will not do much to prevent an attack. It’s meant for after an attack has already occurred. It can help identify weaknesses in the current security system that can be fixed or replaced. Digital forensics can determine if there is still suspicious activity and alert you if steps need to be taken to mitigate those possible Cyber Threats.

Some of the important aspects to consider:

Identifying the cause and possible intent of a Cyber Attack
Safeguarding digital evidence used in the attack before it becomes obsolete
Increasing security hygiene, retracing hacker steps, and finding backdoors
Searching for data access/exfiltration
Identifying the duration of unauthorized access on the network
Geolocating the logins and mapping them

What you can achieve by performing digital forensics?

If your company was a victim of a Cyber Attack, or your company has reason to believe that an employee is distributing trade secrets or storing illegal material, our Digital Forensics Specialists can investigate Cyber-Crimes, crimes that involve a security breach in a system or network and can lead you in the direction to understand what information was compromised.

Our team can intervene and locate a device, an identity or trace back a digital file whether the information was copied or distributed, a photo extracting metadata information, or recover deleted and lost files that could help in an investigation or prove a situation.

Any Part of an enterprise system can be vulnerable to criminal activity, data theft, data loss, and unauthorized penetration. The mission criticality of a compromised application, system, or network determines the level of investigation.

Techniques that we use:

Each Device type has different intrusion methods, that vary from Computers to Mobile Phones, or any digital device. It takes one to know one, and how compromised devices happen, because of what we do, we have accumulated using the mindset of an attacker, to trace back and determine any evidence linking to what we are after.

Some of the methodologies that we perform are:

File Carving extracting lost data and remote recovery.
Computer, Mobile, and Network Forensic data analysis assist individuals and
organizations that need to prove digital evidence bringing the law team together.
Trace back a digital file and extract information from a photo that could help in an investigation.
Malware Analysis and Report.

Digital Forensics Stages

Identification
It is the first step in the forensic process. The identification process mainly includes things like what evidence is present, where it is stored, and lastly, how it is stored (in which format). Understanding the first step is what will define the next phases. Electronic storage media can be Personal Computers, Mobile phones, Tablets, Servers, IoT Devices, etc…
Preservation
In this phase, data is isolated, secured, and preserved. It includes preventing people from using digital devices so that digital evidence is not tampered with. Hashes and Checksums are also used to preserve the original format.
Analysis
In this step, our experts reconstruct fragments of data and draw conclusions based on the evidence found. However, it might take numerous iterations of examination to support a specific crime theory that will be proved officially.
Documentation
In this process, a record of all the visible data must be created. It helps in recreating the scene and reviewing it. It involves proper documentation of the scene along with photos, data mapping, and critical thinking in connecting the evidence to make sense and prove a specific outcome.
Presentation
In this last step, the process of summarization and explanation of conclusions is done. This is the evidence of all the outcomes, that would be clear to prove the point digitally.