Introduction to Digital Forensics

As organizations manage increasing amounts of data and the number of cybersecurity attacks continues to grow, businesses must be able to quickly collect, analyze, and act on digital evidence from across the organization. By leveraging an advanced digital forensics solution — especially one powered by AI and machine learning (ML) — teams can automate these activities, enabling them to effectively trace the origins of an attack, accelerate response capabilities with actionable insights, and inform security efforts to prevent similar attacks in the future.

In this article, we will explore the evolving world of digital forensics and how organizations can leverage it to enhance their security posture.   

What is digital forensics?

Digital forensics is a subset of forensic science that examines system data, endpoint data, user activity, and other pieces of digital evidence to help organizations identify, respond to, and prevent security incidents, breaches, and internal threats. Digital forensics can also be used to help determine who may be behind a cyberattack and the techniques they use.

Digital forensics consists of several key activities, including:

• Digital evidence collection across multiple sources

• Digital evidence analysis and insight generation

• Digital evidence preservation to maintain integrity

• Digital evidence presentation in a legally admissible format

Importance of digital forensics in cybersecurity

With the proliferation of endpoints and the rise in cyberattacks, digital forensics has become a crucial component of an organization's security strategy and threat hunting capabilities. The shift to cloud computing, coupled with the rapid growth of remote work, has also intensified the need for organizations to protect against a wide range of threats across all connected devices.

Digital forensics offers several important capabilities to help organizations strengthen their security standing:

• Enables the identification of the root cause of a security incident

• Assists teams in responding to and remediating attacks

• Provides actionable intelligence for mitigating future attacks by shaping and strengthening preventative security measures

• Helps recover and preserve evidence that may be used in legal proceedings or investigations

• Supports documentation efforts to assist in audits, regulatory compliance, and reporting

Taken together, these capabilities can help organizations reduce overall risk, improve response times, remediate activities more quickly, and identify the responsible parties.

Role in incident response

Digital forensics plays a critical role in incident response, which is the overarching process that an organization follows to prepare for, detect, contain, and recover from a data breach.

When executed as part of incident response efforts, digital forensics provides the actionable intelligence response teams need to contain and remediate attacks more quickly and effectively. This helps organizations accelerate the path to recovery, minimize the damage associated with an attack, and preserve valuable evidence that can support internal and external investigations.

Because digital forensics and incident response efforts are so closely connected, the most advanced security solutions bundle these services together to create a combined capability: digital forensics and incident response (DFIR).

A DFIR solution leverages digital forensics techniques and tools to quickly analyze digital evidence and determine an attack’s vehicle and scope; the solution then applies incident response to contain and resolve the attack.

Combining digital forensics and incident response into a single integrated workflow helps organizations enable faster, more effective threat mitigation while ensuring that evidence is not lost or destroyed during the remediation process. DFIR also assists in post-incident reviews by enabling teams to reconstruct attacks, identify weaknesses within the security posture, and gain valuable insight into how similar attacks can be prevented in the future.

Though incident response is a reactive security function, sophisticated tooling and advanced technology — including AI and ML — have enabled some organizations to leverage DFIR to inform preventative measures. As such, DFIR is beginning to play a bigger role within a proactive security strategy.

Legal and compliance implications

Digital forensics plays a critical role in helping organizations meet legal and compliance requirements, especially in the event of a data breach or other cybersecurity event. Below, we explore three key ways that digital forensics assists legal and regulatory teams:

1. Evidence preservation: Digital forensics tools create a tamper-proof data log. This ensures that evidence of the breach remains unaltered and reliable over the course of an investigation or any subsequent legal proceedings. 

2. Reporting obligations: In some circumstances, organizations are required by law to report a breach within a specific time period. Digital forensics assists organizations with the reporting process by providing a reliable record of what data was compromised, including egressed files.

3. Privacy protection: Organizations must maintain strict data privacy rules, especially when conducting investigations into employee or customer behavior. Digital forensics tools can help organizations ensure they comply with all relevant regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Common techniques in digital forensics

Digital forensics employs a range of specialized techniques that are essential for identifying, investigating, and responding to cybersecurity incidents. Common digital forensics techniques include:

• File System Forensics: Analyzing file systems within an endpoint to identify signs of compromise.
• Memory Forensics: Analyzing volatile memory (RAM) to uncover hidden processes, active threats, or attack indicators that may not appear within the file system.
• Network Forensics: Monitoring and analyzing network activity — including emailing, messaging, and web browsing — to detect an attack, gauge the scope of the incident, and determine the cybercriminal’s attack techniques and intent.
• Mobile Device Forensics: Collecting and analyzing data from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to extract digital evidence to respond to a cyber incident or understand an attack. This evidence may be in the form of call logs, text messages, location data, app usage, or other forms of data that can assist teams in their investigations and response.    
• Log Analysis: Reviewing and interpreting computer-generated event logs and activity records to identify suspicious activity or anomalous events to help proactively identify bugs, security threats, or other risks.
• Disk Imaging: Creating a virtual copy of a physical disk or storage device to allow teams to analyze its contents without altering the original data.
• Data Recovery: Retrieving lost, deleted, corrupted, or inaccessible files to assist in incident response and attack investigations.

Tools used in digital forensics

Digital forensics relies on a variety of specialized tools designed to collect, analyze, and preserve evidence, ensuring that investigators can uncover critical information while maintaining data integrity. Some leading tools include, but are not limited to:

• EnCase: EnCase is a software solution offered as part of a suite of digital investigation products by Guidance Software. It offers forensic analysis capabilities, including security analytics, disk imaging, and evidence presentation.
• FTK Forensic Toolkit: FTK Forensic Toolkit is a forensics software solution owned and operated by Exterro. Known for its speed in processing and indexing evidence data, this solution excels in image collection and artifact discovery.
• Autopsy: Autopsy is an open-source tool providing file system analysis, keyword search, and timeline generation. The platform is maintained by Basis Technology Corp. and community programmers.
• Wireshark: Wireshark is a network packet analyzer — a tool that presents captured packet data in as much detail as possible. Wireshark is especially useful in network forensics.
• XRY: XRY is a digital forensics product specifically designed for mobile device forensics. Developed and operated by the Swedish company MSAB, XRY enables data extraction from a variety of smartphones, tablets, and GPS navigation tools.

Challenges in digital forensics

Organizations face a range of challenges when it comes to digital forensics, most of which stem from either the vast amount of data that must be managed or the rapidly evolving tech landscape. Here are some of the most significant challenges organizations must be aware of as they develop, operate, and evolve their digital forensics capabilities:

• Data Encryption: Data encryption, the process of converting plain text into an encoded format, increases the difficulty of accessing and analyzing evidence. Though data encryption is an important component of every cybersecurity strategy, teams must ensure that any encryption methods they use to protect the organization from threat actors do not interfere with data collection and analysis.
• Cloud Storage: Cloud storage, the act of storing digital data on servers in off-site locations, complicates evidence gathering. The decentralized nature of cloud-based data requires investigators to have advanced data imaging, data recovery, and remote data security and analysis skills to ensure data across multiple cloud servers can be brought together into a single view.
• Volume of Data: Modern digital environments generate vast amounts of data, which increases the time and resources needed to effectively gather and analyze information. Since data is also gathered from a variety of sources, organizations must take steps to format and standardize data to ensure they have a complete and accurate view.  
• Anti-Forensic Techniques: Anti-forensics refers to any technique used by an adversary to thwart an investigation by obfuscating, encrypting, or destroying evidence. Teams must develop solutions that allow them to recover evidence and data that may have been manipulated or deleted during an attack.
• Digital Evolution: The digital landscape is moving faster than ever, with new technologies, tools, and techniques introduced every day. To remain effective, digital forensics solutions must not just keep pace with change but stay a step ahead of adversaries. Organizations must make regular operating system (OS), software, and device updates to successfully extract data; they should also invest in advanced tools that make use of cutting-edge technologies to ensure a strong security posture.

Future of digital forensics

As with every aspect of the cybersecurity landscape, the future of digital forensics is evolving rapidly. Here are some of the most significant drivers of change and how these technologies can help advance organizations’ digital forensics capabilities:

Automation and AI

In today’s digital world, data is being created at an exponential rate. At present, experts estimate that over 400 million terabytes of data are created each day. To manage the collection of a huge volume of data and draw actionable insights from it, organizations must adopt tools that use AI/ML to automate core activity, including data collection, processing, formatting, standardization, analysis, storage, and disposal. As the amount of data continues to grow, the only possible way for teams to maintain control is by effectively using automation to streamline these processes.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is a method of recording information using a tamper-proof ledger maintained by a peer-to-peer computer network. This technology makes it extremely difficult or nearly impossible to alter, manipulate, or delete data. Conversely, blockchain also makes it easier to store and verify forensic evidence. Given these capabilities, blockchain can play an important role in preserving data and evidence during an attack, enabling organizations to understand what happened, who was behind the activity, and how to respond.

Cloud Forensics

The CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report highlighted how adversaries are capitalizing on global cloud adoption, making the cloud a prime battleground. This trend underscores the need for companies to enable strong security solutions, including cloud-based digital forensics solutions. The distributed nature of data stored in the cloud makes it more difficult to gather and analyze, highlighting the need for teams to adopt and scale tools that are specifically designed for use in the cloud.

CrowdStrike’s digital forensics solution

CrowdStrike Falcon® Forensics is an end-to-end security solution that helps teams quickly respond to and recover from cyberattacks with automated forensic data collection, enrichment, and correlation. The solution uses AI, ML, and automation to streamline forensic data collection and analysis, enabling teams to quickly conduct large-scale investigations across the organization.

Key features include:

• Automation of point-in-time and historic forensic data collection across the endpoint fleet to reduce complexity and simplify workflows.

• A unified platform that integrates threat intelligence to maximize efficiency and add rich context to forensic data.

• The ability to enable a diverse range of use cases — including threat hunting, periodic compromise assessments, asset risk analysis, and more — helping the organization maximize their investment.

CrowdStrike Falcon® Data Protection, the industry’s only AI-powered platform for exceptional data protection built on a unified agent and single console, enables digital forensics on data that has egressed or is attempting to egress an organization's environment. Falcon Data Protection offers several important differentiators:

• Data integrity guarantee: Only authorized admins can decrypt retrieved data.

• Secure evidence: Data is not shared with CrowdStrike or any other entity.

• Chain-of-custody assurance: Evidence can only be retrieved and decrypted by an approved administrator.

• Robust auditing: Audit logs are maintained and reviewed to track internal team actions.

How Falcon Data Protection enables digital forensics for sensitive data egresses

What happens when a data security event is detected?

Falcon Data Protection assists security teams in quick and effective incident response and remediation.

Automate data analysis with ML-based detections: Falcon Data Protection’s machine learning models automate the analysis of user behavior and peer group activity to recognize patterns and surface critical issues. By building a baseline of typical data egress behavior, Falcon Data Protection can detect anomalous or malicious activity, such as when files are transferred to a USB drive or personal cloud storage. The system then provides detailed information about the event, including the files involved, user information, data classification (e.g., personally identifiable information, protected health information, and information subject to Payment Card Industry regulations), and other indicators like data volume, file count, and unusual locations.

Retrieve and capture evidence for data forensics: When Falcon Data Protection identifies an anomalous event, it classifies the data and allows organizations to retrieve the evidence for forensic analysis. Without switching between consoles or using complex scripts, organizations can download the files involved in the egress event, whether they were moved to the web, copied to a USB, or pasted elsewhere. To ensure data security, Falcon Data Protection stores the retrieved evidence in a protected location on the endpoint, eliminating the need for cloud storage and preventing tampering or obfuscation.