What Is Cyber Forensic
Application of investigation and analysis techniques to gather and preserve evidence from a particular computer or network or device in a way is suitable to use as evidence is known as Cyber forensics. It is an electronic discovery technique used to determine and reveal technical criminal evidence. It often involves electronic data storage extraction for legal purposes. Cyber forensics is also known as computer forensics. Although it is most often associated with the investigation of a wide variety of computer crime, computer forensics may also be used in civil proceedings. The discipline involves similar techniques and principles to data recovery, but with additional guidelines and practices designed to create a legal audit trail.
Why do you need cyber forensics
Cyber forensics process identifies, collects, analyses and preserves the electronically stored information so that the data can be obtained later and used as evidence in court. Examples of common situations in which computer forensics is used are:
1.When corporate information is disclosed without permission, either by accident or by design.
2.When an employee steals intellectual property from their employer and passes it to a competitor or uses it to set up a competing company also when an employee violates a computer policy, such as when and how to use the Internet. Some organizations have rules on how the computer or the Internet should be used. If the systems in the office are used for any illegal activity, computer forensics can help determine when and how these illegalities happened.
3.Damage analysis and assessment after an incident have occurred.
4.Financially-motivated crimes that are committed by government or business professionals. These crimes include identity theft, Ponzi schemes, and advance-fee schemes. White-collar crimes can wipe out life savings, destroy companies or cost investors billions in losses. Computer forensics can be used to help in investigating such crimes.
5.Stealing trade secrets from a competitor by recording or copying confidential documents. Examples of documents involved include secret formulas, product specifications, and business plans. This is known as Industrial espionage and it is an illegal activity, and computer forensics can help during investigations.
6.This involves deliberately providing false or misleading information to gain something unfairly. A lot of fraud is perpetrated through the Internet or with the help of technology, and computer forensics can help investigate these crimes.
7.Sexual harassment, deception and negligence.
8.Collection of information that may be used to terminate a person’s employment in the future.
9.General criminal and civil cases. This is because criminals sometimes store information in computers.
10.Commercial organizations and companies can also use computer forensics to help them in cases of intellectual property theft, forgeries, employment disputes, bankruptcy investigations and fraud compliance.
Why do you need cyber forensics
As the world is ever moving forward so is the technology. And as we get more and more dependent on computers and digital devices, we are exposing our general and personal information to the internet. This increases the risk of getting attacked by cybercriminals. And as cybercrimes are skyrocketing, it has never been the most required time for cyber forensics
How cyber forensics is done
Cyber forensics is done in many ways depending on the nature and situation of the crime. This may include forcibly acquiring the affected or suspected device to decrypting and using many more technologies to acquire necessary documents and evidence. Depending on where the crime took places such as on computer or network, different techniques are used. Some are given below:
Live Forensics
Live forensics, also known as Live Response, attempts to locate, control, and demolish threats in a live, running system environment. In traditional computer forensics, static images of memory and storage drives are taken, and rigorous analysis is performed on these images in an isolated environment. Of course, this can clog up the analysis pipeline, as imaging is far from being a time-efficient process. This is where live forensics comes into play. As opposed to traditional computer forensics, live forensics deals with active threats at runtime. It is an active response, in contrast to the passive nature of traditional forensics. Live forensics is greatly useful if you plan on tackling a threat on the spot. It should be noted that the difference between traditional forensics and live forensics lies only in response times; you still have to follow the same steps of identifying, quantifying, and eliminating the threat. Live forensics allows for near-instant access to registry keys, system user accounts, live connections, and memory objects.
Data Recovery
Data recovery is the restoration of data that has been damaged, deleted, or lost. This is one of the more common settings that a forensics professional may have to deal with. As we become more and more data-driven, most cannot afford to lose this data. This can include personal data, including family photos and videos, or professional data such as documents, sensitive company information, etc. Data recovery commonly takes one of two forms: in-place recovery, where tools can be used to recover data by remediating disk drive errors; or read-only recovery, which does not repair errors on the original point of failure, instead of storing the recovered files somewhere else on the disk.
Password Recovery
Password recovery refers to the recovery of password-protected files that are rendered useless if the passwords are lost. A password can provide strong protection to sensitive data or information. But sometimes it gets lost or the admin forgets and it becomes a big problem. In such cases, password recovery is your best bet to recover your files. Password recovery can be accomplished by solving the password through brute force, which attempts all possible combinations allowed for that password. But In most cases, this can be highly time-consuming. More efficient techniques can be employed to vastly reduce the number of possible passwords. The problem can be compounded if the files are also encrypted.
File Carving
A forensic technique that uses file contents, rather than file metadata, to find or recover a said file. As discussed above, when a file is deleted, it does not necessarily mean that it has been erased from the drive. Usually, the operating system merely loses its handle on the file, otherwise known as the file’s metadata. Thus, you cannot access the file through your file system, as it is now oblivious to the file’s existence itself. You can still recover such files based on their content, and such a recovery is known as file carving. File carving extracts meaningful, structured data from a structureless, unallocated portion of the drive. It is most useful when file or directory entries are either corrupt or missing.
IP address tracing
Internet protocol address means to trace IP address right down to its real address. it involves reverse IP lookup, which means locating and counting the number of servers which lie between the source and destination which are also known as hops.
Packet Sniffing
When any data has to be transmitted over the computer network, it is broken down into smaller units at the sender’s node called data packets and reassembled at receiver’s node in the original format. It is the smallest unit of communication over a computer network. It is also called a block, a segment, a datagram or a cell. These packets can contain any kind of data such as sent and received email, passwords, and usernames. Packet sniffing is the technique used to get a hold of these packets and look at the information contained in the packets.
Some Tools We Use
Some of the Tools we use to perform Cyber Forensic are given below:
• Hex Editors
• Disassemblers
• Disk analyzers
• Decryptors
• Packet sniffers
• DNS Tools