TL;DR
- Digital forensics helps organizations look backward after a cyber incident to understand what happened, why, and how - a critical complement to forward-focused cybersecurity practices.
- Forensic investigations often have legal implications. Before collecting evidence, ensure your organization has the authority and complies with local laws and insurance requirements.
- Using detailed checklists improves consistency, ensures thorough investigations, and helps teams avoid missing critical steps.
- Recording every action and decision taken during an investigation is essential for accountability and accuracy - ideally with the help of automation tools.
- Cybersecurity training for employees should include digital forensics awareness so that staff understand the importance of preserving evidence and supporting investigations correctly.
For most organizations, cybersecurity is a forward-looking practice. Its purpose is to detect threats, remove them, and then get back to business as usual. But while this may work in the short-term, more mature organizations will understand that the best way to prevent threats from happening again is to take the time to look backwards and understand why or how a threat occurred. This is the realm of digital forensics.
To better understand this critical practice, we caught up with Alan White, author of the Forensic Team Field Manual, a pocket-sized reference guide forensic professionals and incident responders can use to ensure their investigations are thorough, efficient, and defensible. Here’s what White says you should know as you begin practicing digital forensics at your business.
What is digital forensics?
As its name implies, digital forensics is related to forensic science, except that its investigations take place on computers, networks, databases, and other digital environments. While cybersecurity teams can make use of digital forensics to find the origins of a cyber attack or uncover a vulnerability they weren’t aware of, it can also be used to collect formal digital evidence for use in court. For this reason, there are often strict processes digital forensic investigators must follow when gathering and handling evidence.
That said, the sheer amount of situations that digital forensic specialists may encounter, along with the many different possible avenues their investigations can follow, can mean different companies, or even different individuals, may use much different techniques. “If you give five investigators the same question — here's a hard drive, go find me something — they're going to go in different directions,” said White. “Instead, they need to start by asking what is the goal of their investigation and how are they going to go about it. This is what I try to help address in my book.”
Digital forensic best practices
So what are some ways you ensure your investigations produce the most accurate results? White’s advice aims to help organizations be more methodical, detailed, and precise. Here are three ways they can do this.
1. Take into account any legal considerations first
Sometimes, digital forensic investigations are as simple as finding out who did what and how it happened. If a hacker installed key logging software on your CFO’s computer, for example, then this would likely be a fairly cut-and-dry case. However, because digital forensics can often overlap with privacy rules, it is vital that companies first understand any legal implications before collecting evidence.
“There are a lot of rules at state levels and country levels that could become a legal liability if you perform an investigation in which you don't have the authority,” said White. As an example, he cited personal phones. “Just because your company puts a piece of software on your mobile phone to protect it doesn't necessarily mean they have the right to acquire your phone and investigate it. There's boundaries like these that have to be understood and followed.”
Not only this, but companies and investigators should also understand any procedures their insurance company will require before they can make a claim. “Even if you have a great policy, a multi-million dollar policy,” said White, “if you don’t bother following the proper procedure, they may deny your insurance claim.”
2. Make use of checklists
An effective digital forensics investigation can be defined by one aspect: how thorough it is. This is why White makes checklists so central to his manual. “You can’t have loopholes or ambiguous assumptions,” he said. “You need to make sure you're looking through a system methodically, thoroughly, and getting what you need to solve the original set of questions.”
These checklists should not only help cover the foundational questions that surround every case — who, what, where, why, when, and how — but also provide forensic teams with standardized processes they can follow for multiple workflows. They may include the proper steps to follow when acquiring data, analyzing memory or user logs, conducting file forensics, and more.
As simple as they may be, a checklist can nevertheless produce powerful results. “They can help you get to a place where you will know you’ve looked everywhere you should. They give you certainty.”
3. Record everything as you do it
We’ve all seen it happen. The moment an attack is detected and an investigation begins, people start to change things. They might have good intentions, but the result can often be confusion. Even worse, it can impede the investigation and make it even more challenging to discover what really happened. For this reason, White emphasizes the importance of capturing every critical change and decision.
“There’s the concept of a scribe,” he said. “When there's a cyber incident, somebody needs to make sure that all the actions taken and decisions made are captured and are chronologically accurate.”
You should not only know what was done but when a change occurred. You should know who made the change and, if possible, why. Even before something happened, you should know the full state of a system, including what was being monitored up until that point. You should have as complete a picture of your digital environment as possible both before and after an incident.
But we don’t have to do all this on our own anymore. “We have plenty of AI tools now that can really help us ensure all of our activities are synchronized and captured,” White said. “This makes it so much easier to create a more accurate and chronological set of steps.”
Reduce your risk
As threats continue to evolve and become more sophisticated in order to evade detection, digital forensics will become even more important — and challenging. But White hopes that readers of his Field Manual will come away with at least one piece of advice: “If you build a plan and you follow it correctly,” he said, “you can reduce your risk of missing something or ensuring that you covered everything.” In other words, if you understand what it takes to be as thorough as possible, you’ll be able to approach your investigation with the confidence you need to succeed.
Curious about digital forensics and want to explore more? Check out our Digital Forensics course to become familiar with the field’s core principles. Just one of the many career paths Cybrary has to offer.
