Understanding the Cybersecurity Incident: The Power of Digital Forensics
When faced with a breach, understanding what happened, how it happened, what information was accessed, and who was responsible becomes crucial for recovery, security remediation and compliance. This is where digital forensics comes into play, we offer small and medium sized businesses a way to uncover all the facts behind the cyber incident they’re facing. Let’s delve into the world of digital forensics and explore its vital role in responding to cybersecurity incidents and recovering from cyberattacks.
What Is Digital Forensics?
Digital forensics, often referred to as cyber forensics or computer forensics, is the process of collecting, analyzing, and preserving electronic evidence to investigate cyber incidents. This evidence can include data from across the IT network including computers, servers, mobile devices, routers, digital storage media, and cloud accounts, like Microsoft 365, Azure AWS, Google, Salesforce, etc. Digital forensics experts use specialized tools and techniques to uncover the details of a cyber incident.
The Role of Digital Forensics for Small and Mid-sized Businesses:
Understanding the Breach: When a cyber incident occurs, the first step is to understand the nature of the breach. Our digital forensics analyze the breach to help small businesses determine how the attack occurred, the timeline, what systems and/or data were affected, what vulnerabilities were exploited, etc.
Preserving Evidence: Our digital forensics specialists ensure that all relevant evidence is preserved in a legally admissible manner. This is essential for potential litigation and regulatory compliance. We collect the evidence and store it in a secure manner.
Supporting a Cyber Insurance Claim: Like any other insurance claim, the insurance provider will want to see evidence of what you are requesting them to pay out. This may include event logs, internet traffic logs, malware samples, computer images, a formal forensics report, etc.
Identifying the Culprit: With insider attacks and intellectual property theft, identifying the perpetrator is crucial. Digital forensics can provide valuable insights into the origin of the attack and the tactics used, which may aid in tracking down the responsible party.
Legal and Regulatory Compliance: Just like large enterprises, small to midsize businesses have legal and regulatory obligations regarding data breaches; such as state breach disclosure laws and/or breach notification laws, federal data privacy laws like HIPAA, and rules from regulatory bodies like FINRA. Digital forensics helps ensure compliance with reporting requirements and assists in fulfilling legal obligations. Digital forensics can also be important for other litigation, especially around business email compromise.
Recovery and Prevention: Understanding the details of a cyber incident like what vulnerabilities were exploited, what security controls failed, and the timeline for the last clean backup are vital for recovery. It allows businesses to take corrective actions to prevent future attacks and strengthen their cybersecurity posture.
The Digital Forensics Process:
Identification: The first step is recognizing that a cyber incident has occurred. This can include unusual system behavior, data breaches, or suspicious activity.
Preservation: Evidence must be preserved to maintain its integrity. This includes collecting a forensic image of affected systems, copies of logs and other artifacts, and then securing this digital evidence with clear chain of custody; access controls and audit logs, etc.
Analysis: Our digital forensics experts analyze the preserved evidence to reconstruct events, identify vulnerabilities, and determine the extent of the breach. We’ll correlate logs of disparate systems in the IT network and create a timeline of the breach. We’ll can then compare the evidence to threat intelligence to gain deeper insights into the breach.
Documentation: Detailed documentation of the findings is essential for legal and compliance reporting purposes. This documentation serves as a record of the investigation.
Reporting: A comprehensive report is generated, summarizing the findings of the digital forensics investigation. This report is crucial for decision-making and potential legal actions.
Usually the digital forensics investigation can be done remotely.
Conclusion: Uncovering the all the Details
For the small to medium sized businesses, a cybersecurity incident can be overwhelming. Digital forensics is a major piece of our Cybersecurity Incident Response Team that provide the facts to help you understand the breach, make informed decisions, and stay in compliance. Small businesses that invest in digital forensics during and after a breach have shorter breach lifecycles and less costly breaches.
