How to perform a successful Cyber forensic investigation?
Cyber forensic investigation is an emerging field with dynamic growth in the demand for professional forensics analysts. Due to the world evolving into an increasingly digital society, organizations need to deploy sophisticated tools that store and deliver reliable information about cybersecurity incidents. From this fact, we offer you an article that compiles details about the skills and tools that you should use to have a successful cyber forensic investigation in your organization.
What is Cyber Forensic Investigation?
Cyber forensic investigation is the process of investigating and finding evidence behind cybercrimes. Cyber forensic investigators collect data from devices, computers, the Internet, and even other digital resources so that criminals can be caught.
What is the best digital forensic investigation tool?
An investigator can use different digital forensics tools depending on their specialties and data sources. However, there is no more powerful tool for forensic analysis than Security Information and Event Management SIEM tools.
Basically, SIEM tools collect through the “Security Event Management” process all the logs events that occur in your network from various data sources. It also real-time monitors your IT infrastructure and detects any suspicious users behavior, malicious activity, or hacking attempt to alert security professionals about these possible threats. A Next-Gen SIEM platform can identify any threat through its AI-powered event correlation engine that incorporates robust correlation rules to compare current events with stored past events in its database.
In these cybersecurity terms, large organizations have the upper hand. For them, it isn’t an issue to increase the cybersecurity budget and include some forensic specialists capable of operating with the costly SIEM platforms in their IT department. However, although small startups and mid-sized businesses can not say the same, all is not lost. Often, SIEM providers offer SOC as a service or a managed SIEM to help them monitor their network environment and reduce cybersecurity costs. Where both services deliver cyber forensic investigation capabilities as needed.
Keep in mind that only SIEM solutions with a Unified Threat Management system (UTM) have forensics capabilities. The UTM systems monitor the persons’ IP addresses and track their online activity. It tracks down on spammers the internet to discover who makes harmful posts about the company. Also, it validates if a website is actively engaged in spamming activities or not.
A modern or Next-Gen SIEM can analyze files, emails, network activity, incidents, and other potential artifacts through powerful learning machine algorithms. However, you need to previously install a tool instance to collect all logs events data generated in your environment. In this way, forensic analysts will be able to investigate the scope and root cause incident to take containment action.
Why do companies need Cyber Forensic Investigation?
When it comes to mitigating and responding to threats, a robust incident response plan can help you lessen the harmful effects of an attack. However, within the stages of this plan, the forensic investigation has extensive notoriety due it helps you:
- Identify who was accessing the computer system or network illegally.
- Discover what kind of malware or malicious software program was used to penetrate the network.
- Recognize what did happen with data and devices after hacking.
- Preserve any evidence in its most original form.
- Collect information about suspicious events.
Conclusion
Any forensic analyst who develops the essential skills to carry out a cyber forensic investigation will be able to fulfill his/her assignment successfully. However, it’s a good cybersecurity practice that organizations deploy Next-Gen SIEM tools to simplify cybersecurity management and compliance and ensure the integrity of information in digital forensics.
At UTMStack, we can help you perform a successful cyber forensic investigation by deploying our cost-effective Next-Gen SIEM platform or requesting our ethical white-hat hacker services. Get in touch with our UTMStack team!
