Basic Steps of Digital Forensic Investigation

1. Basic Steps of Digital Forensic Investigation The field of computer forensic investigation is growing. With the advent of cybercrime, tracking malicious activities has become crucial for protecting private citizens as well as preserving online operations in public safety, national security, and government and law enforcement. Digital forensic allows investigators to uncover premeditated criminal intent and may aid in the prevention of future cybercrimes. Digital forensic, a science of detecting evidence from digital media like computers, mobile phones, servers, social media, email accounts, file-sharing services and many more. Digital forensic is defined as the process of preservation, identification, extraction and documentation of computer evidence that can be used by the court of law. Digital Forensics entails the following steps: ●Preliminary Analysis: Forensic investigators need to initiate preliminary analysis to figure out the critical details of a cybercrime. The analysis must include a thorough assessment of the case to devise the best approach to investigating its intricacies. A forensic analyst takes note of the system under surveillance taking into consideration factors such as the role of the system in the organizational structure and networks, configured operating systems, custom specifications, RAM and the system location. An In-depth analysis helps in planning effective strategies for investigating the crime. ●Evidence Acquisition: refers to collecting the maximum amount of data from all the likely sources and identifying the data integrity. The collection of volatile data is subject to change and requires special attention. It includes login session details, network connections, RAM content caches and running processes. Nonvolatile data calls for hard disk investigation. ●Evidence Identification: This step calls for identifying and accessing the potential evidence and presenting it in digital format so that it can be easily understood.

2. ●Evaluation: This key step helps the Digital Forensics team to decide if the gathered potential evidence can be used to draw legal conclusions. Every evidence collected is assessed on various grounds to analyze if it can be presented legally during the trial and if it can lead the case towards expected conclusions. To have a successful evaluation the collected data is preserved and an event timeline is created, perform media and artifacts analysis, string search, and employee data recovery tool to authenticate the collected evidence. ●Reporting and Documentation: The analyzed results and the details of the performed actions are reported, recommendations to improve the procedures, and the guidelines and the tools used during the investigation. Final reports are shared with the parties associated with the governing body of law. Now more than ever, cybersecurity experts in this critical role are helping government and law enforcement agencies, corporations and private entities improve their abilities to investigate various types of online criminal activity and face a growing array of cyber threats head-on.