What is Digital Forensics in Cyber Security?

Digital Forensics is defined as a forensic science branch that deals with the recovery, investigation, and preservation of digital evidence considering legal standards. It is a process of storing, analyzing, retrieving and preserving electronic data that may be useful for investigation. It may include data from hard drives in computers, mobile phones, smart gadgets, vehicle navigation systems, electronic door locks, and other digital devices. 

The term digital forensics was initially used to cover any piece of technology that contains digital data. The terms digital forensics, computer forensics, and cyber forensics are used interchangeably. Just like in forensics, a crime scene is analyzed to collect evidence of fingerprints or anything else that may lead to DNA evidence, in similar manner, with digital forensics, a device becomes the crime scene. The investigator attempts to find out who accessed it, what was stored on it, what could have been deleted, etc.

Who can use Digital Forensics?

There are two groups of people who mainly use  Digital Forensics:

• Law enforcement agencies in criminal and civil cases: The agencies use digital evidence to aid suspects’ convictions. These cases can be murder trials or civil cases which involve transfer of property.
• Incident response teams in businesses: These people are the first responders to cyber attacks including data breaches or ransomware threats. They use digital forensics to inspect the entry points and its possible remediation.

What is the importance of Digital Forensics?

• As per the recent scenario, the businesses are rapidly changing due to technological advancements, which led to streamlined processes and increased efficiency, and increased the attack surface. The attack surface is the multiple points of entry that makes an organization vulnerable to external threats. In such a case, digital forensics is important to incident response and compliance auditing. 
• Regulations of HIPAA need security and privacy controls within the organization’s systems. In case of data breaches, digital forensic reports can prove to the regulatory bodies that business has met all these requirements.
• Moreover,  thorough forensic investigation leads to uncovering other vulnerabilities. Those malwares and viruses that are unrelated to the case but harmful to the systems may crop up. Thus, businesses can leverage forensic reports to enhance their security hygiene.
• Digital Forensics is used to recover stolen or lost data. Damage analysis is a part of the process.
• In the world of the internet, providing a cloak of anonymity, digital forensics helps to stop online harassment and fraud. The law enforcement agencies have a cyber cell which deals with these crimes. This is helpful to defense departments to keep track of unusual military activity.

What is Digital Evidence?

Digital Evidence depends on the type of device that is being scraped through. This can be anything from user account data to electronic door logs. There are two types of Digital Evidence that the investigators gather:

• Volatile Data: It is a digital information that is stored in a temporary medium. This data is lost when the device is powered off. The most common volatile data in a digital forensics investigation is Random Access Memory (RAM). Other examples are network connections, open files, active sessions and running processes. Anyone can collect residual data from the above mentioned sources.
• Non-volatile Data: It is a digital information stored in permanent mediums, generally in hard disks. The data is retained even when the device is switched off. Non-volatile data includes system files, event logs, dump files, configuration files and account information. This data is less tricky to collect for evidence as compared to volatile data.

What are Digital Forensics Tools?

Digital Forensics tools can be both hardware or software based. These tools are used to inspect devices while maintaining the integrity of the data. Some of the standard tools are discussed below:

• Network analysis tools: These tools are mainly network monitoring tools that extract traffic and payload information.
• File analysis tools: These tools are used to extract and analyze individual files.
• Registry tools: The Windows-based computing systems maintain user activity in the form of registries. These tools gather information from them.
• Database analyzers: These tools extract, analyze, and query the database to gather the necessary information.
• Data capture tools: These tools are used to capture data, both encrypted and otherwise. They provide a window into persistent hard disks and enable data extraction without damaging original content.
• Email scanners: They scan all email communications for the purpose of gathering evidence. These are significant for inspecting social engineering attacks.
• Mobile device scanners: These devices scan both internal and external memories in mobile devices.

Types of Digital Forensics

Digital Forensics was initially a single science, but gradually it has branched off due to the variety of digital data. There are different types of digital forensics based on the focus of the investigation:

1. Electronic discovery- Electronic discovery or e-discovery is digital data analysis, processing and preservation. It is used in a regulatory or legal context.
2. Incident Response- From a corporate point of view, incident response is digital forensics, which aims to ensure business continuity and eliminate the impact of an event such as a data breach. The internal teams of businesses predominantly carry it out.
3. Forensic data analysis- This type of cyber forensics deals explicitly with organized data, that involves data analysts combing through troves of data to arrive at usable evidence. It mainly affects the financial fraud space.
4. Computer Forensics- Computer forensics is digital forensics that involves accessing, gathering, and analyzing information on computer systems that operate at a computing or storage capacity. 
5. Database Forensics- This involves the analysis and extraction of data and metadata from databases. It includes data stored by third-party services in a contract with the suspect. 
6. Network Forensics- All digital devices are connected to each other and the inherent using computer networks. Network forensics deals with the analysis of network traffic patterns and incriminating payloads.
7. Memory Forensics- The memory forensics focuses on RAM. It is also called live acquisition as it presents the “crime scene” as it is.
8. Cloud Forensics- Cloud forensics deals with cloud-hosted information, as most systems are on the cloud now. It requires the analysis of configuration, security, and the geolocation of cloud-based assets. It requires cooperation from cloud vendors such as AWS and Google Cloud.
9. Disk Forensics- It is another subset of computer forensics, disk forensics, which specializes in data retrieval and recovery from non-volatile devices.
10. Email Forensics- Email forensics involves retrieving and scanning all email communication, specially the deleted ones. Forensic analysts find identities, content, time stamps, and other metadata linked to the emails. Email forensics looks for forged emails and malicious content including phishing emails.
11. Malware Forensics- It is a type of forensics that deals with tracing the source of malware which has already been injected into the system. It is a part of incident response. Malware forensic analysts investigate the severity of damage and try to trace it back to the code used to build the malware.

Conclusion

Digital Forensics is an active field changing along with the world’s technological landscape. In recent times, cyber attacks have become common and due to the availability of hacking tools and elements such as the dark web, these can be tackled. Cloud setups have led to data storage  through multiple geographical locations, which lead to jurisdiction struggles. The government bodies and organizations at global level struggle to streamline digital forensic laws and policies. This indicates heavy investments to be made in this field, which makes digital forensics a difficult part to ignore.

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