Cyber Forensics and Incident Handling

Forensics is an essential part of cybersecurity. Any cyber incident must be solved through the cyber forensics team who can find out the exact issue and how the mishap takes place. This chapter will learn about the needs and objectives of cyber forensics, how to approach a crime or incident, and some incident handling categories.

What is Cyber Forensics?

Cyber forensics, also known as computer forensics, is a practice of capturing, collecting, processing, analyzing, and reporting digital data in a legally permissible approach. This part of cybersecurity mainly deals in detecting and preventing cybercrime and any issues and incidents where evidence is stored in a digital format. The forensic investigators use specific methodologies where evidence regarding any crime is discovered and put forward in the Court of Law.

Organizations and companies hire cyber forensics for analyzing these cyber-related crimes and incidents that cybercriminals can be found and punished through the court of law.

What Are the Needs of Computer Forensics?

Here are some of the useful points about why computer forensics is required:

• Detection and pretension of crime.
• They survey a crime scene that is associated with any digital evidence.
• Search and identify data that is related to cybercrime in any digital asset.
• Digital evidence can be easily destroyed if not handled properly. Cyber Forensic Investigators are competent in handling that digital evidence.
• Cyber forensics can also help in recovering encrypted, deleted, or corrupted files.

Primary Objectives of Cyber Security Forensics Investigators

1. For recovering, analyzing, reporting, and presenting computer-oriented materials so that it can be easily demonstrated and presented in the form of evidence in the court of law.
2. To identify evidence in a short time frame, and estimate the overall menace and impact of the malicious cyber activity on the victim user or organization and suggest for protection against the attack.

Steps or Stages of Forensics Investigation

There are some specific ways to track cybercrime or go to a solution for how cybercrime took place. The steps are:

1. The incident occurred in any company or organization.
2. The employees or members contact the company's advocate for legal advice.
3. Advocate contact cyber forensics investigator (external or internal).
4. The forensic investigator will come and prepare the FRP, i.e., First Response Procedure documentation.
5. The investigator then seizes the evidence and other assets related to the crime scene and transports them to a forensics lab.
6. He/she will start analyzing the files and other assets.
7. Examine all the data one after another and further contact the person or group of people associated with the incident.
8. The report will be formed and concludes the investigation, where all the analyses will be written and explained.
9. The report is then handed to the organization's legal authorities.
10. The legal authority will then go through the report(s) and will press charges against the offensive in the court of law.
11. The forensic investigator will delete all the data once the entire case is closed.

What is Incident Handling?

Cybersecurity and forensics have another essential terminology that is often used in this field - incident handling. Computer security incidents are some real or suspected offensive events related to cybercrime and cybersecurity and computer networks. Forensics investigators or internal cybersecurity professionals are hired in organizations to handle such events and incidents, known as incident handlers.

Incidents are categorized into three types:

• Low-level incidents: where the impact of cybercrime is low.
• Mid-level incidents: The impact of cybercrime is comparatively high and needs security professionals to handle the situations.
• High-level events: where the impact of cybercrime is the most serious and needs security professionals, and forensic investigators to handle the situations and analyze the scenario, respectively.