Introduction to Cyber Forensics Investigation

The responsibilities of a cyberforensics investigator are varied. They are required to have knowledge about network engineering, programming, security, and law enforcement among many other things.

A cyberforensics investigator is typically involved in the following tasks:

• Investigations of digital evidence for criminal cases.
• Verifying the identity of online users for various purposes
• Collecting digital evidence from mobile devices or computers for criminal cases.
• Investigating computer crimes related to identity theft, hacking, child pornography etc.

• Cyber security analysts are trained to investigate networks, either remotely or on-site. They may use personal hardware or virtual tools to obtain data from compromised devices, logins, and passwords.
• The work of cyber forensics is often quite challenging. What they do is to examine digital evidence in order to identify authors of criminal activity and their motives. This includes looking at the content of email messages, network traffic logs, or chat logs. It also involves tracing the connections that were made by someone trying to hack into networks and checking for malware signatures that could be used as evidence of an attack.

• Cyber forensics investigations are a set of techniques and tools used to detect, investigate and recover data from cybercrimes. The aim is to collect, examine and analyze the evidence from the crime scene along with other places that were affected by the hacking.
• There are three main types of cyber forensics investigations: digital forensic analysis, electronic discovery and digital investigation. Digital forensic analysis is performed on physical devices such as computers or handheld devices (phones). Electronic discovery is related to the identification of documents and other information in databases like emails or PDFs. Digital investigation refers to collecting evidence from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter etc.

• The goal is to figure out what happened, who is responsible for it, and if necessary, to prove it in a court of law.
• Forensic investigators are trained in computer science and digital forensics.They use tools which can help them collect data from systems that have been damaged or compromised.
• Forensic investigations are not about identifying the source of the attack or patching vulnerabilities in order to prevent future attacks. Forensic investigations are about understanding how an incident has impacted a system and victim's assets, analyzing the malware used in the incident, collecting evidence for prosecution purposes, finding out what evidence can be gathered from infected machines or storage devices.