Digital Forensics: Catch Criminals with a Computer
5 Min Read
Digital forensics and incident response, once used only in cybercrimes, has expanded its usefulness to retrieving digital evidence that can support everyday cases in a court of law. This expands challenges, possibilities, and job opportunities throughout the field.
What is Digital Forensics?
Digital forensics refers to the actions and processes used to collect, process, preserve, and analyze digital evidence. Digital evidence — information stored or transmitted in binary form that may be relied on in court — can refer to all files, including audio and video, and is found on computers, mobile phones, closed-circuit televisions, digital faxes, and more.
5 Properties of Digital Evidence
For digital evidence to be of value, digital forensic investigators must ensure it adheres to the following standards. Evidence must be:
- Admissible. It must meet the standards to be used in a court of law.
- Authentic. Evidence must be tied to the incident to prove a point.
- Complete. Digital forensics must work to retrieve evidence that shows more than one perspective — how the perpetrator could be guilty but also innocent.
- Reliable. Collection and analysis must follow procedures that prove authenticity and remove any concerns of corruption.
- Believable. Evidence needs to be clearly understood by a layperson.
5 Steps in Digital Forensics
Digital forensic investigators must follow a set of procedures in evidence collection like other criminal investigators. In terms of evidence, they need to:
- Identify. Know what the data is, where it’s located, and how it’s stored while differentiating it from junk files.
- Preserve. Digital evidence must be preserved as close as possible to its original state, and any changes must be documented and justified.
- Analyze. Use the relevant information to recreate a chain of events.
- Document. Ensure there is an account of all the data used to recreate the crime.
- Present. Communicate the meaning of the evidence in a way that a layperson could understand it.
Why is Digital Forensics Important?
Digital forensics, and the speed at which a forensic investigation happens and evidence is obtained, is critical to prevent data breaches, provide evidence in legal cases, protect intellectual property, and recover lost data.
- The information obtained in a digital forensic investigation helps investigators understand the core elements of a crime and, even more importantly, bring the perpetrator to justice.
- In the National Institute of Justice Journal, the authors explain how digital and other forensic evidence “can be used to identify a suspect, associate a suspect with a victim, associate a suspect with a crime scene, and corroborate other evidence,” especially in the absence of something as critical as DNA evidence.1
What is Incident Response?
Cybersecurity incident response (IR) is an established process within an organization to manage a data breach or cyberattack with the goals to:
- Identify an attack quickly
- Minimize a cyber threat’s effects
- Contain damage
- Remediate the cause
- Reduce future incidents
An important part of digital forensics is the analysis of suspected cyberattacks so threats can be identified, mitigated, and eradicated. In turn, this makes digital forensics a critical part of the incident response process as it confirms whether a cyberattack occurred and its cause, identifies the cause behind the attack, and collects evidence.
Incident Response Cycle
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) identifies a four-part cyber incident response plan with interconnected stages:2
1) Prepare for a cybersecurity incident.
This involves making a complete list of IT assets and their level of importance in managing sensitive data. Monitoring those assets establishes a baseline of normal activity, determining which types of events should be investigated. As part of this step, a detailed cyber incident response plan is outlined with steps for common incidents.
2) Detect and analyze a security incident.
Through data collection from IT systems, security tools, publicly available information, and people inside and outside the organization, the team identifies what may signal a threat as well as the markers that one has or is happening. In the analysis portion of this step, you’ll correlate related events and see if they deviate from normal behavior, and if so, how.
3) Contain and eradicate the threat and recover standard operations.
Within the containment step, the attack gets stopped before it overwhelms resources or causes damage. The strategy in how to do so is informed by the level of damage it can cause and balanced by the need to keep services available to employees and customers safely.
Once the incident has been successfully contained, you need to eradicate it — identify all affected hosts, remove malware, and close or reset passwords for breached accounts.
Finally, restore systems and recover normal operations as quickly as possible while taking the necessary steps to ensure the same assets aren’t still vulnerable to attack.
4) Perform post-incident analysis.
In this final step, you want to ask the critical questions that allow you to learn how to prevent similar attacks in the future and update your policies and processes in the preparation stage of incident response.
In cybercrime, acting fast can help stop active incidents and reduce overall damages. It’s important to have a cyber incident response plan and follow best-in-practice standards in incident response and digital forensics.
What Lies Ahead for Digital Forensics?
Like the rest of cybersecurity, digital forensics and investigation projections point to rapid expansion. Globally, the size of the market is expected to more than double its 2022 rate of USD 6.1 billion and achieve a market size of USD 15.9 billion by 2032.3
As the digital economy grows through the increasing adoption of cloud-based services, technologies, and mobile use for personal and professional use, so do the incidents of data breaches and fraud and the need for digital forensics experts.
A lack of skilled professionals and the rapid increase in technologies, combined with the organized efforts of ransomware gangs and other cyber criminals, are leading drivers of growth in the industry.
According to a recent report by Acumen Research and Consulting, the industry will increase its adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies in digital forensics investigations and look toward using blockchain technology to secure digital evidence.3
Sources
- National Institute of Justice. “Sexual Assault Cases: Exploring the Importance of Non-DNA Forensic Evidence.” Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/sexual-assault-cases-exploring-importance-non-dna-forensic-evidence.
- National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved October 28, 2024, from https://www.nist.gov.
- Acumen Research and Consulting. “Digital Forensics Market Size – Global Industry, Share, Analysis, Trends and Forecast 2023 – 2032.” Retrieved July 3, 2024, from https://www.acumenresearchandconsulting.com/digital-forensic-market.