How can a successful Cyber forensic investigation be conducted?

Cyber forensic investigation is a developing field, with demand for professional forensics analysts growing rapidly. As the world becomes an increasingly digital society, organizations must deploy advanced tools that store and provide dependable information about cybersecurity incidents. For this reason, we offer an article that gathers details on the skills and tools you should use to achieve a successful cyber forensic investigation in your organization.

What does Cyber Forensic Investigation involve?

Cyber forensic investigation is the process of examining cybercrimes and locating the evidence behind them. Cyber forensic investigators gather data from computers, devices, the Internet, and other digital resources so that criminals can be caught.

Which digital forensic investigation tool is the best?

An investigator can use different digital forensics tools according to their specialties and data sources. Yet, no tool is more powerful for forensic analysis than Security Information and Event Management SIEM tools.

At their core, SIEM tools use the Security Event Management process to collect all log events generated on your network from multiple data sources. In real time, they also monitor your IT infrastructure, spotting suspicious user behavior, malicious activity, or hacking attempts, and then alert security professionals to these potential threats. Any threat can be identified by a Next-Gen SIEM platform through its AI-powered event correlation engine that incorporates robust correlation rules to compare present events against past events stored in its database.

In these cybersecurity matters, large organizations have the advantage. For them, increasing the cybersecurity budget and adding forensic specialists who can operate costly SIEM platforms in their IT department is not an issue. However, although small startups and mid-sized businesses cannot say the same, all is not lost. SIEM providers often offer SOC as a service or a managed SIEM to assist them in monitoring their network environment and cutting cybersecurity costs. In this situation, both services provide cyber forensic investigation capabilities when required.

Keep in mind that only SIEM solutions with a Unified Threat Management system (UTM) offer forensic capabilities. UTM systems keep tabs on individuals' IP addresses and track their online behavior. They hunt down internet spammers to find out who creates damaging posts about the company. They also check if a website is actively involved in spamming activities or not.

A modern or Next-Gen SIEM can analyze files, emails, network activity, incidents, and other potential artifacts through powerful machine learning algorithms. However, you must first install a tool instance to collect all log event data generated in your environment. In this way, forensic analysts will be able to investigate the scope and root cause of an incident to take containment action.

Why is Cyber Forensic Investigation necessary for companies?

When it comes to mitigating and responding to threats, a robust incident response plan can help you reduce the harmful effects of an attack. However, among the stages of this plan, forensic investigation has considerable prominence because it helps you:

• Determine who accessed the computer system or network illegally.
• Find out what type of malware or malicious software program was used to penetrate the network.
• Recognize what happened to data and devices after hacking.
• Keep any evidence in its most unaltered state.
• Gather data on suspicious events.

Conclusion

Any forensic analyst who develops the necessary skills to conduct a cyber forensic investigation will be able to complete his/her assignment successfully. However, it is a good cybersecurity practice for organizations to deploy Next-Gen SIEM tools to simplify cybersecurity management and compliance and ensure the integrity of information in digital forensics.

At Unified Security Stack, we can help you run a thorough cyber forensic investigation by deploying our affordable Next-Gen SIEM platform or requesting our ethical white-hat hacker services. Reach out to our Unified Security Stack team!