Businesses are on guard for cyberattacks now more than ever before. It’s necessary for all businesses and organizations.
More crimes are being committed online than ever. In 2019, the FBI received more than 460,000 cybercrime complaints, totalling about $3.5 billion in damages.
These complaints turn into digital forensics cases to track down the culprits responsible for the crimes.
Read on to learn more about digital forensics and when you should conduct your own digital forensic investigations.
What Is Digital Forensics?
Have you ever watched CSI? It’s the TV show where forensic experts use evidence to piece together what happened at a crime scene. They collect physical evidence and analyze it.
The field of forensics has become more and more advanced and accurate over the years.
Technology has changed the way crimes are committed, too. Since more crimes are committed over the internet, a need has emerged for digital forensics.
In this field within forensics, digital forensics looks at the evidence on computer devices and across an IT infrastructure to piece together a cybercrime. This is more challenging than you can imagine because cybercriminals know how to cover their tracks well.
They use encryption, delete logs, or intentionally leave tracks to throw digital forensics experts down paths that lead to nowhere.
When Businesses Rely on Digital Forensics
Believe it or not, digital forensics can do more for your business than just piecing together cyberattacks. You can implement digital forensics in a number of instances. Here are a few examples.
Intellectual Property Theft
Intellectual property and trade secrets are among the most important assets of your business. Employees may leave your organization and take this information to sell to competitors or work for them.
It can also play a significant role in documenting trademark infringement cases.
Human Resources Issues
If you have employees who are claiming worker’s compensation or have submitted a harassment case against another employee, digital forensics can help gather evidence to support these claims.
Online conversations, such as emails, texts, and location data on devices can be collected and gathered as evidence.
Cybercrimes
This is probably the most common application of digital forensics is in tracking down cybercrimes. You may not be able to trace the attack to the hacker, but you can discover how the hacker breached your networks.
More often than not, employees are the cause of these attacks. They may click on a link that leads to a malware download that lets hackers into your networks. An employee may deliberately breach your networks to cause harm to your business.
Find Lost Data
Can data be recovered even after someone accidentally deleted everything? That is a question that digital forensics can answer.
Even if you have backup files, those backups can be deleted. Data usually stays hidden on devices until another file overwrites the data. Digital forensics experts can locate those hidden files and recover your lost data.
How to Conduct a Digital Forensics Investigation
Since you may be dealing with a legal or criminal investigation, you may want to hire a professional digital forensic practitioner who has extensive legal and IT knowledge to find and preserve the evidence.
This way, should your case ever have to go before a judge, you know that the work was done properly and will be held up in court.
If you want to conduct an investigation that has no legal implications, you can do it yourself. You just need to have encryption, digital security, and networking skills.
Here are steps you should take when conducting a digital forensics investigation.
Secure and Copy All Files
The first step in digital forensics cases is to secure and copy all files from storage devices and hard drives from all affected devices.
You have to remove all devices in question from network connections. That will preserve the data that remains on the device. You should also copy network logs, as they contain valuable information, too.
Recover and Analyze Data
Your next step is to recover all deleted and hidden files. You have to maintain the evidence as is, so work from your copied files to examine data.
You should open hidden and encrypted files to look for clues and evidence as well. One area you shouldn’t overlook is unallocated space on a hard drive. Unallocated space usually contains file fragments that can be used as evidence.
Document Everything
You want to make sure that your findings can hold up in digital forensics cases. Documenting every step in the process is an important part of proving your case.
The Future of Digital Forensics
As technology changes, so will digital forensics. The increase of internet of things (IoT) devices has created its own branch of digital forensics, called IoT forensics. These devices are also targets of hackers, which means that they can access and manipulate home devices and security cameras.
Major global events have as much of an impact on digital forensics as emerging technologies. This article from Capsicum Group sums up which events you want to pay attention to in 2020.
Solve Your Own Digital Forensics Cases
Cybercrime is a reality for every organization, whether you have a small business or run a major government organization. Each incident can cost thousands of dollars, putting these organizations at risk.
If cybercrime happens within your organization, it’s up to you to figure out how it happened and how to prevent it from happening again. Digital forensics cases often find that employees are responsible, whether it was accidental or intentional.
You may need to get digital forensics experts involved to investigate because if the cause was intentional, you want to make sure that the evidence is held up in court.
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