It happens every day to thousands of companies. Data breach, cyber espionage, ransomware, trojans, viruses, worms, insider leakages, whistleblowing – in other words, a kind of attack that brings devastating damage to a company. Those sad cases when bad guys overcome good people.
At this moment, most CEOs feel regrets about they did not care timely to harden the protection of their assets. But in fact, there is no time to regret – you must act as quickly as possible to prevent from more damage. Firstly, you have to find out immediately how deep the attackers have penetrated your endpoints and networks and what harm they have done to them. Secondly, you need to detect who attacked you and why. For that purpose, you must carefully gather and properly save digital evidence that can help to find the culprits and bring them to justice.
In other words, it’s time to tap into digital forensics.
How digital forensics can help you
- Detecting, recovering, analyzing, and preserving digital evidence
- Tracing back cyber perpetrators
- Obtaining, organizing and storing gathered materials properly to present them as evidence in a court.
- Assessing possible damage of the cyberattack
- Presenting the results of the investigation in a formal report (for a client or a court case).
- Providing evidence that a cyber-incident really took place (You don’t want to be considered crying wolf and accused of fraud, don’t you?)
How digital forensic works
Everyone on the Internet leaves digital traces. Every criminal or spy penetrated your digital assets leaves traces too. It can be found on endpoints, networks, servers, and mobile devices. But to detect, obtain and store them in a way suitable for presenting as evidence in a court case is quite a tricky challenge. Here is why.
Firstly, cybercriminals used plenty of sophisticated tools and methods to cover their tracks, including deleting, distortion and alteration of the data. Secondly, the victim herself can easily damage valuable digital data unknowingly, even with good intentions. As a result, the perpetrators may avoid getting caught.
How is it possible?
Check yourself with the following test. Imagine, you discover that one of your company computers is infected. What do you think you should do: switch it off immediately or leave it switched on until the rescue team arrives?
If you, like many other people, have chosen the first variant, you possibly give the criminal a pass to freedom. Why? Because some traces of the attack can be stored in the computer’s operative memory, and experienced digital forensics specialist can extract and keep this data. But if you reboot the computer, they are lost forever. So the correct answer is to isolate the computer from the network to avoid spreading the malware but keep it turned on until digital investigators arrive.
And it’s only one example of diverse tiny professional secrets of digital forensics known only to top-qualified specialists. Digital forensics is a sophisticated duel between the cyber detectives and cybercriminals, and its outcome mostly depends on professionalism and effectiveness of the specialists you choose to deal with.