Discover the Top 5 XDR Use Cases for Today’s Cyber Threat Landscape
The outlook of cyber threats in this modern cyber warfare theater has changed a great deal. Annually, 60% businesses1 drop victims to data breaches and cyber-attacks.
Security teams intrinsically find themselves in a scenario whereby they lack visibility and control of the network traffic and are incidentally unable to detect and respond in real-time. To this regard, modern cybersecurity strategies now incorporate network forensics into their arsenal of defenses. Digital forensics platforms can be used to manage network evidence analysis and other tool categories effectively.
Network Forensics is a fast easy process for capturing and analyzing live network data, with the objective of information gathering, incident identification, and for legal evidence recovery purposes.
Organizations could use the captured network traffic that was in the data packets to help in the discovery of activities and communications in relation to malicious events, such as cyber-attacks or data breaches.
This process is essential to incident comprehension, mitigation of risk, and prevention of future breaches.
Network forensics involves several key processes that ensure a thorough investigation of network activities. These processes are designed to gather and analyze data effectively while maintaining the integrity of the evidence.
Network devices like routers, switches, and firewalls are crucial sources of data for network forensics.
Network and application anomalies ranked second, with 23 percent of organizations2 experiencing such cyber-attacks, while system anomalies followed, with 20 percent last year.
The process of network forensics begins with identifying anomalous patterns in network traffic. Identifying unusual network traffic patterns will involve monitoring for unauthorized access, unusual data transfers, or other suspicious activities indicative of a security incident.
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Once anomalous patterns are identified, the integrity of the evidence must be preserved. Evidence preservation involves copying relevant network data and logs to assure that they have been preserved in their original state. Properly preserving forensic evidence is critical to maintain the continuity of evidence which is important to legal proceedings.
Network forensics involves investigators obtaining data from other sources including routers, switches, and firewalls. The data collected may consist of packet captures, logs of network events, and other telemetry which could assist investigators in developing a picture of the network traffic during the event.
Packet capture tools like Wireshark and TCPDump are essential for capturing and saving network data for later analysis. These tools show the content of network messages, providing critical insights into network activity.
Once the data is collected, the data will need to be examined for specific events that were related to the security incident. In this step, investigators may recover file transfers, review communication patterns, and examine other attributes for indicators of compromise.
Once the evidence is examined, the next step for forensic capability network involves analyzing the evidence to organize, interpret the evidence significance, and the attack methods used by the attackers, as reasonable as possible to determine the risk to the organization.
The outcome of the analysis must be documented and depicted in a format which is clear and concise; the documentation is imperative to convey the conclusions to others, including law enforcement or legal teams which may be useful in court.
Finally, the analysis of forensic data gathered is utilized to inform the incident response process and decision-making for how to mitigate the immediate existing risk and prevent the compromise from happening again moving forward. Actions may include implementing security measures, revising policies or procedures, or resource training further training for personnel.
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Network forensics embodies the procedures for monitoring and analyzing network traffic to gather information, detect intrusions, and collect legal evidence.
Log analysis tools like Splunk and ELK Stack are essential for reviewing records from network devices, as they can quickly identify patterns within large volumes of logs, which is crucial for effective network monitoring and analysis.
NetFlow analysis tools like SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer are also vital for analyzing traffic patterns and identifying unusual activity, helping to monitor how the network is utilized.
Signature-based detection tools are, hence, rudimentary for network forensics. These tools basically match the network traffic against a database of known threat signatures and thus allow for the identification of familiar threats. While effective against known vulnerabilities, such tools may struggle against zero-day exploits and advanced persistent threats.
These are essential tools for capturing and then analyzing data packets flowing over a network. Cybersecurity professionals make use of packet forensic tools like Wireshark to sniff network traffic in real-time, which will give them insight into the network protocols working and can further detect potentially suspicious activities. The tools are essential in actively monitoring a network and investigating incidents.
Intrusion detection system tools like Snort and Suricata play a crucial role in monitoring network activity and identifying potential threats.
Flow analyzers are designed to analyze traffic patterns and flow data. They provide bandwidth usage information and performance data of applications, thus assisting in the detection of suspicious network security threats. This is done by looking at the flow data and being able to find anomalies to back up an organization’s response to an incident.
Advanced network forensics tools offer comprehensive features, including automated packet capture, deep packet inspection, and advanced analytics. These tools are designed to handle large volumes of data and provide a holistic view of network activity, making them essential for thorough investigations and incident response.
Digital forensics platforms can be used to manage network evidence analysis and other tool categories, facilitating the entire process of collecting data and generating reports related to network investigations.
Hands-on techniques and best practices must be applied while carrying out effective network forensics so that comprehensive investigations can happen with robust network security measures.
While a powerful tool, network traffic forensics faces challenges that can hinder its effectiveness. Understanding these obstacles is crucial for organizations to develop robust network forensic capabilities and ensure successful incident response and investigation.
Probably, the biggest challenge in network forensics lies in the huge volume of data produced by modern networks. Network traffic is through the roof, mainly due to the growing number of devices, applications, and users.
Storing and managing these volumes of data is not easy. Therefore, organizations have to balance between complete retention of data and their capability concerning storage space and cost.
The wide range in adoption of encryption protocols, including TLS and SSL, is a challenge to network forensics. Investigators can find themselves in a situation whereby they have an extensive amount of trouble analyzing the content of network communications if there is no access to decryption keys.
With more applications and services going to end-to-end encryption, network forensic tools have to rapidly change to deal effectively with encrypted traffic.
It is very important for the integrity of the collected network data to be admissible as legal evidence. Tampering or corruption of data either partially or totally may destroy its credibility and affect the decision of an ongoing investigation. Chain-of-custody maintenance, secure storage methodologies, and strong access control are necessary for data integrity.
This is quite a common challenge encountered in network forensics: the data being captured and analyzed contains sensitive or private information. In such cases, it becomes very hard to maintain a balance between the requirements of end-to-end network forensic analysis and individual privacy.
Organizations are legally liability-bound to take necessary care for relevant data protection legislation and put in place appropriate safeguards to ensure privacy related to individuals whose data might get captured during network forensic investigations.
Network forensics can be resource-intensive; after all, it calls for special tools and skilled personnel, not to mention high computing power.
For organizations with limited budgets or technical expertise, it would be quite challenging to effectively implement and then maintain network forensic capabilities. Ways to overcome these challenges include careful allocation of resources, cloud-based solutions, and proper training of security teams.
Conducting a thorough network forensic examination involves several key steps:
As network forensics continues to take its growth lead, advanced techniques and tools are being reached by organizations to make strides in their capabilities:
With the ever-evolving cyber threats and complexities of the modern-day network it is paramount to adopt cutting-edge techniques and industry partners, to be better equipped to stay at the forefront of such integrated applications of network forensics.
Fidelis Security offers an integrated NDR solution with highly applied threat detection, real-time visibility, automated investigation, incident response, and compliance assurance. Fidelis enables organizations to elevate their security posture, lower risk, assure compliance better, and optimize efficiency through their products.
Cyber forensics or digital forensics is the process of the collection and analysis of digital evidence from computers, phones, and networks. It aims to reveal the source, nature, scope, and damage caused by cyberattacks.
Network forensics is a subset of cyber forensics, in which the emphasis is put on the research of network traffic and data packets that are communicated over a network. In turn, this conclusion emphasizes the analysis of data in the movement rather than data that is already stored on devices.
In the performance of any network forensic examination, the following is always the main process:
Network forensics is used by various stakeholders:
While both are branches of digital forensics, there are some key differences:
There can be some automation in areas of network forensics, like the following:
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