Digital Forensics and Incident Response (Dfir): an Introduction

Digital forensics and incident response is an important part of business and law enforcement operations. It is a philosophy supported by today’s advanced technology to offer a comprehensive solution for IT security professionals who seek to provide fully secure coverage of a corporation’s internal systems.

For this reason, many businesses are turning to DFIR to ensure the security of their most vulnerable and critical platform technology, like cloud services, devices and more. In the following article, we’ll review DFIR, including:

• What is DFIR?
• What are the common capabilities of it
• Digital forensics vs. physical forensics
• The challenge of securing endpoints

This content is designed to help readers learn about DFIR capabilities, how to identify incidents within their own company and how to manage threats with an understanding of process, technique and communication.

What is Digital Forensics and Incident Response?

Digital forensics is a division of computer forensics that focuses on examining the digital components of an individual or business to determine if illegal action has been taken, either by the owner of the equipment or through a vicious cyberattack.

Computer forensics represents the skill set that IT professionals use to examine hard-drives and computing devices. However, in a digital business climate, it’s important to expand consideration of threats to other digital properties like networks, memory, digital artifacts and more. In this way, digital forensics helps IT professionals identify instances of cybercrime like malware and hacking.

Incident response refers to the complementary set of processes that occur when an incident has been identified. In incident response, it’s important that communication is clear and accessible, that all parties involved are notified by an incident response manager for the organization and, further, that steps are identified to resolve the issue.

During digital forensics and incident response, IT professionals might be tasked with malware analysis. Malware can be reverse-engineered by software professionals to learn more about how it operates, how it was produced and who made it.

What Capabilities are Common in DFIR?

Digital forensic technology solutions help clients support DFIR operations. Here are some of the capabilities you can expect from a DFIR software solution:

• Data acquisition that spans a number of sources, multiple devices and systems
• System transparency that offers clear visibility into actions and administrative processes
• Investigation capabilities that are comprehensive and compliant
• Reporting including features like robust visualization
• Automating iterative processes that help incident managers find all instances of artifacts, faster, with less guesswork