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Practical Windows Forensics

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  1. Free Chapter
    The Foundations and Principles of Digital Forensics
About this book
Over the last few years, the wave of the cybercrime has risen rapidly. We have witnessed many major attacks on the governmental, military, financial, and media sectors. Tracking all these attacks and crimes requires a deep understanding of operating system operations, how to extract evident data from digital evidence, and the best usage of the digital forensic tools and techniques. Regardless of your level of experience in the field of information security in general, this book will fully introduce you to digital forensics. It will provide you with the knowledge needed to assemble different types of evidence effectively, and walk you through the various stages of the analysis process. We start by discussing the principles of the digital forensics process and move on to show you the approaches that are used to conduct analysis. We will then study various tools to perform live analysis, and go through different techniques to analyze volatile and non-volatile data.
Publication date:
June 2016
Publisher
Packt
Pages
322
ISBN
9781783554096

 

Chapter 1. The Foundations and Principles of Digital Forensics

Everything around us is changing, the way that we communicate, how we do our work, how we store or retrieve data, and even the rate of life is changing. Technology is changing everything. Crime has its share of the change because the nature of targeted valuable assets has changed, it is digital now. The normal users can now perform monetary transactions without leaving their chair, and corporations and businesses of different sizes and types usually exchange their sensitive data using their local network. So in return, instead of breaking into banks or companies, crime has also gone digital. Nowadays, your personal information, bank account details, and your corporate database are some of the targets for digital criminals.

So, how can we investigate these crimes? The investigation concepts haven't changed. This is what we will look at in this introductory chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is digital crime?

  • Digital evidence

  • Digital forensics goals

  • Analysis approaches

 

What is digital crime?


Let's suppose that a criminal breaks into a bank to steal the money in the safe, and in another case an attacker somehow hacked into the bank's private network and transferred money to his account. Both of these are targeting the monetary assets of the company.

In the first case, if an investigator needs to track a criminal, they would apply their investigation skills to the crime scene. They would track the attacker's fingerprints and activities to finally get a clear idea about what happened and identify the criminal. In the second scenario, the investigator needs to track the criminal's digital traces on the local system, the network, and even through the Internet in order to understand the criminal's activities, and this may uncover their digital identity.

In an ordinary crime, the investigator needs to find the crime's motivation and target. In cybercrime, the investigator needs to know the malicious code—the weapon—that the attacker used in conducting their crime, the vulnerability exploited to compromise the digital system, and the size of the damage. In the same way, we can apply the same investigation mechanisms to digital crime after taking into consideration the different nature of assets and attacks.

There are various targets of digital crime. These start from harassment to stealing credit cards and money online, to espionage between countries or big companies; as we recently saw there were some famous and aggressive malware programs and attacks that were thought to be developed with nation-level support against other nations, targeting some infrastructure or sensitive information. Also, these attacks that were targeted at some famous companies in different fields led to information and data leakage.

For these reasons, investing in securing the assets in their digital form has gained great importance in the last decade in both governmental and private sectors. One branch of the information security process is digital forensics.

 

Digital forensics


Identifying and analyzing information security incidents and the related digital evidence is called digital forensics. Generally, forensic science is the scientific method of gathering and examining data about the past to extract useful information related to the case under investigation. Digital forensics is the analysis of digital evidence in order to answer questions related to a digital incident, which takes place at the time of the analysis in case of a live analysis or takes place in the past; this is called postmortem analysis.

Postmortem analysis is applied after the incident has occurred, and it usually takes place in all cases. However, some cases require the analysis to be conducted during the incident. Generally, the analysis can confirm or refute a hypothesis about the incident to rebuild a full picture about the activities of both the attacker and the victim during the time of the incident.

One of the definitions of digital forensics is Rodney McKemmish's, which stated the following:

"Forensic Computing is the process of identifying, preserving, analyzing, and presenting digital evidence in a manner that is legally acceptable."

From this, we can divide the digital forensics analysis into four subphases, which also represent the four principles of a successful process:

  • Identification: The investigator or the analyst must understand the circumstances of the incident and collect the data that is important to the investigation. They need to understand the usual behavior of the systems and the structure of the network, and they need to interview responsible individuals if needed. These are important to totally understand the environment and handle the possible evidence properly so that they do not lose valuable information or miss collecting related evidence.

    During incident handling, the first responder may need to acquire a live system. Each acquisition or analysis step performed on a live system will leave a trace, and in some cases, this overwrites previous data or traces either in the system memory or on the hard drive. The responder must understand the consequences of using the handling tools on the system and try to minimize their tools' traces on the system in order to minimize data loss during incident handling.

  • Acquisition and preservation: The acquisition methods of digital evidence must ensure integrity preservation of the evidence and justify this when needed.

    Acquiring all the data from the incident scene will help in the analysis phase to build a whole picture of the incident. In a busy working environment, retrieving the status of the incident scene won't be easy. One way to memorize this is to take notes about all the systems in the scene, and in some cases, taking snapshots will be beneficial to remembering how these devices were connected.

  • Analysis: Different platforms and technologies mean different types of evidence, which need to be examined. Therefore, the analyst or the investigator needs to have the required technical and investigation skills to find and extract the related information to the case under investigation.

    The analyst needs to examine all the data collected even if the case has been solved. Examining all the evidence could provide new clues or state new possibilities.

  • Reporting and presentation of the digital evidence: This should summarize the first three phases of the process. It should include the steps taken in order to identify, seize, and examine the digital evidence. Besides including the findings of the examination, the conclusion of the findings and the expert opinion must be included in the report.

 

Digital evidence


As a normal reaction, the change in technology led to a change of possible evidence, as compared to previous traditional evidence. All the components of the computer system could be evidence, such as the following:

  • The hard drive of the criminal or the victim

  • The operating system artifacts and special files

  • The network traffic

  • The computer memory

  • Mobile phones and tablets

  • Cloud storage

  • Shared storage

  • Network devices

  • The systems' logs

  • The devices' logs

  • GPS devices

  • Simply, any device that can store or process data

Due to the wide range of possible evidence, the incident handler or first responder who will handle and process the available devices in the incident scene must have sufficient experience in dealing with whatever types of evidence they may find at the scene.

Handling digital devices is a very significant task, which the whole investigation process relies on. This is considered to be one of the main principal needs that have to be fulfilled in order to conduct successful digital analysis.

 

Digital forensic goals


The main object in the digital forensic analysis is the digital device related to the security incident under investigation. The digital device was either used to commit a crime, to target an attack, or is a source of information for the analyst. The goals of the analysis phase in the digital forensics process differ from one case to another. It can be used to support or refute assumptions against individuals or entities, or it can be used to investigate information security incidents locally on the system or over a network.

Consider analyzing a compromised system, the goals of the digital forensics, as a whole, are to answer these questions:

  • What happened to the system under analysis?

  • How was it compromised?

During the analysis too, the analyst could answer some other questions based on their findings, such as the following:

  • Who is the attacker? This asks whether the analyst could find the attacker IP and/or an IP of the command and control server or in some cases the attacker profile.

  • When did it happen? This asks whether the analyst could ascertain the time of the infection or compromise.

  • Where did it happen? This asks whether the analyst could identify the compromised systems in the network and the possibility of other victims.

  • Why did it happen? This is based on the attacker's activities in the hacked system, the analyst can form an idea of the attacker's motivation, either financial, espionage, or other.

 

Analysis approaches


During incident handling, each case can be considered as a different scenario. Therefore, different approaches can take place during the first response, based on the circumstances of the individual case. There are two general approaches that can be used to deal with a security incident:

  • Live analysis: This is usually performed when the analyst has a live system in hand. Shutting the system down is one of the "don'ts" that the responder shouldn't do. Performing some primary analysis of the live system can provide valuable information that can guide the analyst in the future investigation. Also, in some situations, a quick analysis of the incident is highly required when there is no time to go through the normal steps of the analysis.

  • Postmortem analysis: This is the normal steps of the process, where the responder acquires all the available data from the incident scene, and then conducts postmortem analysis on the evidence.

Mainly, the hybrid approach is considered the best, where the responder conducts the live analysis on the powered on and accessible systems, records their findings, and acquires all the data, including the live ones, for postmortem analysis. Combining both results from live and postmortem analysis can clearly explain the status of the system under investigation. Performing the acquisition first in such a case is the best practice as the evidence will be acquired before any analysis traces are in the system.

 

Summary


In this introductory chapter, we discussed some definitions that are related to digital forensic science, its goals, and its analysis approaches.

In the next chapter, the live and postmortem analysis approaches will be explained in details with the tools that are recommended for each approach.

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