Data breaches have become a challenge in the modern business world. If an attacker lays their hands on private data, the company faces loads of trouble in the form of money and reputation.
And if the data belongs to their customers, the damage becomes even bigger and often less repairable. Now we are all clear that companies have to stop data infringements.
IT forensics is a field that has been proven as a savior for many organizations. Digital forensics detectives are helping crime investigation agencies to solve these highly technical and time-sensitive issues that businesses face with data breaches.
IT forensics helps organizations work out evidence of cybercrimes and understand their extent. This data can help companies and their customers in terms of security and prevent future attacks.
Forensics is not everyone's cup of tea. Specialized skills are needed instead of generic skills to make out forensic evidence.
In this piece, we will shed light on how IT forensics can help enquire about data breaches or compromises.
How Does Digital Forensics Help Examine Evidence?
Digital detectors can help businesses get up and running after a downtime due to a cyber attack. But these professionals don't have IT forensic training in analysis methods to avoid data alteration.
IT forensics agencies can help even cyber insurance consumers by enquiring about the data breaches that affect them. It is very similar to any other crime scene.
The most crucial stage is the preservation of digital evidence. Courts ask how you obtained the evidence, and if they are not satisfied, they may render the proof invalid, wasting all your efforts.
How Can IT Forensics Help Enquire Data Breaches?
Digital forensics can solve these mysteries for you:
Did the infringement occur?How did it affect the company, and what was the extent of the breach?How did the breach occur?IT forensics detectives will evaluate the network and search for symptoms of a lingering attack, like unpermitted user accounts, viruses, or accounts with unauthorized access.
They can ascertain if the breach is still happening and strengthen the business’s protections to stop ongoing damage.
Importance of Expertise in IT Forensics
Often in-house teams don't have much external exposure to the field, while the people who have worked with multiple agencies and cases are usually more experienced and knowledgeable.
IT forensics experts can pinpoint hidden issues in a firm’s network defences and infrastructure and use their expertise to fix them.
Forensic experts partner with an organization’s crisis communication professionals to offer people and consumers the latest data about confidential information that someone may have infringed.
Forensic professionals also brief companies on the security measures they should take to safeguard their customers from future attacks.
Securing Protected Client Data
Some organizations like healthcare centres gather and record confidential customer data like Protected Health Information or Personally Identifiable Information.
State and federal notification authorities regulate these types of information, meaning their breach can lead you to a lawsuit.
These government rules make the recovery strategies extra complicated and expensive. According to a 2015 study, “Cost of a Data Breach” by Ponemon, average costs of private or sensitive data breaches increased by 8% per record from $201 to $217.
It means a business would lose 4.3 million dollars if 20,000 of its data records have been compromised.
IT Forensics Methods Used by Detectives
IT forensics service providers use various methods and proprietary software to investigate the duplicate data they have obtained from a breached device.
These tools and techniques help them search concealed files and unallocated disk storage for duplicates of encoded, removed, or damaged folders.
Then, the investigators carefully record digital evidence found on the copy in a finding report. They confirm with the actual machine to prepare for court hearings that include discovery, depositions, or real litigation.
Digital forensic detectives utilize their expertise combined with some techniques. Some of them include:
1- Reverse Steganography
It is a usual strategy to conceal information within any digital folder, data stream, or message. Law enforcement agencies reverse a steganography effort by assessing the information hashing that the document in question possesses.
If someone hides crucial data within a digital folder or picture, it may appear the same before and after to the unqualified eye. But the underlying string of data or hash that denotes the picture will change.
2- Stochastic Forensics
In this tactic, forensic experts examine and rebuild digital activity without using digital artifacts. Artifacts are unplanned changes of information that happen from electronic processes.
Artifacts involve clues related to an electronic felony, like alterations to folder qualities during data robbery.
Stochastic forensics is highly useful in data breach examinations where the cyber criminal is suspected to be the affected company’s employee who may not leave behind electronic artifacts.
3- Cross-drive Analysis
Cross-drive analysis corresponds and cites data present on many disk drives to look for, evaluate and maintain data related to an inquiry.
Law enforcement authorities compare suspected events with the contents of other storage spaces to determine similarities and make associations. It is also called anomaly detection.
4- Live Analysis
In this technique, Digital forensics professionals assess a PC from inside the operating system while the device is functioning, with the help of system programs.
The live analysis technique focuses on volatile information usually kept in RAM or cache. Some applications used to obtain volatile data demand the device be in a forensic laboratory to preserve the integrity of a chain of evidence.
5- Deleted Data Retrieval
Crime investigators look at a computer and its memory for fragmented files that someone partially deleted in one location but leaves hints elsewhere on the device. It is sometimes called data carving or file carving.
How Can You Use IT Forensics as Evidence?
Law enforcement agencies and civil and criminal law have been using digital forensics as evidence since the 1980s.
Here are the accounts of some noteworthy incidents:
1- Apple Trade Secret Theft
Xiaolang Zhang was an engineer at the autonomous car department of Apple. He declared retirement and said he would be shifting to China to look after his mother.
He told the management that he would find a job at a digital vehicle manufacturer in his home country, raising suspicion.
An FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) affidavit says that the company’s security personnel inspected Zhang’s activity on the Apple network.
They discovered, in the days leading up to his retirement, he downloaded proprietary knowledge from private firm databases which he could access. FBI indicted him in 2018.
2- Enron
This case is among the most notorious accounting scam scandals. Enron is an energy, commodities, and services firm in the USA. It falsely announced revenue of billions of dollars before crashing in 2001, financially harming its workers and investors.
IT forensics experts evaluated TBs of data to figure out the complicated scamming plan.
The scandal played a big role in the legislation of the Sarbanes Oxley act of 2002. It places new accounting compliance rules for the public sector.
3- Google Trade Secret Theft
Anthony Scott Levandowski was an executive of both Google and Uber. The courts charged him with 33 cases of trade secret breach.
Levandowski was part of Google’s self-driving program and saved thousands of program-related files from a password-protected company sever. He left Google and launched Otto, a self-driving truck agency that Uber acquired in 2016, as per Newywork times.
The court found him guilty of one trade secret theft case and sentenced him to 18 months behind the bars and over 850,000 dollars in restitution and fines. Levandowski got a presidential pardon in January 2021.
4- Larry Thomas
He shot and murdered Rito Llamas-Juarez in 2016. The court later found Thomas guilty after viewing hundreds of content pieces he published on Facebook under the false name of Slaughtaboi Larro.
One big piece of evidence was a bracelet investigator found at the crime site featured in Larry’s picture published as part of one of his Facebook posts.
5- Mikayla Munn
She killed her newborn by putting him in a bathtub till death in her dormitory at Manchester University in 2016. Police encountered her last Google searches, which contained “At-home abortion,” leading to her conviction.
6- Michael Jackson
Law enforcement agencies utilized medical records and metadata from the iPhone of Michael Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray, to convict him of Jackson’s murder.
The phone showed the investigators his prescriptions to Jackson containing fatal quantities of medicines, leading to Jackson’s death in 2009.
Bottom Line
The space of data breaches is becoming more complex day by day. In these times, IT forensics plays a critical role in helping organizations piece together hints about the extent and size of a breach.
It helps them curb the damage, fulfil their regulatory and legal obligations and assure consumers that they are striving to help avoid such an incident from occurring in the future.
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