Summary
Highlights
Forensic analysis involves controlled and documented techniques to identify, collect, examine, and preserve digital information. Secure State provides a rigorous approach, ensuring tools and processes are forensically sound and unaltered. The process includes evidence acquisition, analysis, and reporting to maintain a secure state and support incident response.
The primary goal of forensic analysis is to identify unauthorized or anomalous indicators, understand their deployment, and assess their impact. After a compromise is identified, the focus shifts to regulatory and legal compliance, business impact, and risk. Next steps involve additional acquisition, documentation, remediation, and determining if sensitive data was compromised.
All details, facts, and processes related to an incident or forensic investigation must be thoroughly documented, time-stamped, reviewed, and signed. This ongoing documentation is critical for accuracy and completeness in reporting. Incident data, especially sensitive information, must be safeguarded with restricted access and proper storage according to policies and regulations.
Backtrack offers several image acquiring tools like DD, DD rescue, dcfldd, afflib, convert, afinfo, and afcat. These tools create exact, bit-by-bit replicas of digital media without altering the original content. Acquiring an image allows for analysis on high-end workstations while keeping the original media undisturbed.
DD is a popular Linux command-line tool for imaging digital media like hard drives and USB drives, creating raw, bit-by-bit copies. Examples show how to image an entire disk or a specific partition, and even how to pipe image data over a network. However, DD has limitations, especially when dealing with media that has bad sectors, leading to the use of more advanced tools like DD rescue.
AFF (Advanced Forensic Format) is an advanced forensic image format tool featuring error recovery, compression, and verification. It's an extensible open format for storing disk images and relevant forensic metadata, such as serial numbers and imaging dates, which is a significant advantage over raw imaging tools like DD. Afcat is a command-line utility used to print various contents of an AFF image file.
Air imager is a GUI frontend for DD and dcfldd, offering features such as the use of either tool, auto-detection of drives, image compression (gzip/bzip2), image verification (md5/sha1), imaging over TCP/IP networks, splitting images into multiple files, and writing zeros to a drive or partition. It also allows customization of source/destination and skipping specific bytes.
Forensic analysis, while crucial for investigations, faces challenges in consistently linking evidence to a single source, except for DNA. Forensic analysts work within the justice system, providing key evidence in criminal investigations. Their responsibilities include classifying and performing tests on evidence such as hair, fibers, tissue, and firearms found at a crime scene.