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Digital forensics is the process of collecting and analyzing digital evidence in a way that maintains its integrity and admissibility in court.
Digital forensics is a field of forensic science. It is used to investigate cybercrimes but can also help with criminal and civil investigations. Cybersecurity teams can use digital forensics to identify the cybercriminals behind a malware attack, while law enforcement agencies might use it to analyze data from the devices of a murder suspect.
Digital forensics has broad applications because it treats digital evidence like any other form of evidence. Officials follow specific procedures to collect physical evidence from a crime scene. Similarly, digital forensics investigators adhere to a strict forensics process—known as a chain of custody—to ensure proper handling and protection against tampering.
Digital forensics and computer forensics are often referred to interchangeably. However, digital forensics technically involves gathering evidence from any digital device, whereas computer forensics involves gathering evidence specifically from computing devices, such as computers, tablets, mobile phones and devices with a CPU.
Digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) is an emerging cybersecurity discipline that combines computer forensics and incident response activities to enhance cybersecurity operations. It helps accelerate the remediation of cyberthreats while ensuring that any related digital evidence remains uncompromised.
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Digital forensics, or digital forensic science, first surfaced in the early 1980s with the rise of personal computers and gained prominence in the 1990s.
However, it wasn’t until the early 21st century that countries like the United States formalized their digital forensics policies. The shift toward standardization stemmed from rising computer crimes in the 2000s and nationwide law enforcement decentralization.
As crimes involving digital devices increased, more individuals became involved in prosecuting such offenses. To ensure that criminal investigations handled digital evidence in a way that was admissible in court, officials established specific procedures.
Today, digital forensics is becoming more relevant. To understand why, consider the overwhelming amount of digital data available on practically everyone and everything.
As society increasingly depends on computer systems and cloud computing technologies, individuals are conducting more of their lives online. This shift spans a growing number of devices, including mobile phones, tablets, IoT devices, connected devices and more.
The result is an unprecedented amount of data from diverse sources and formats. Investigators can use this digital evidence to analyze and understand a growing range of criminal activities, including cyberattacks, data breaches, and both criminal and civil investigations.
Like all evidence, physical or digital, investigators and law enforcement agencies must collect, handle, analyze and store it correctly. Otherwise, data can be lost, tampered with or rendered inadmissible in court.
Forensics experts are responsible for performing digital forensics investigations, and as demand for the field grows, so do the job opportunities. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates computer forensics job openings will increase by 31% through 2029.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlines four steps in the digital forensic analysis process. Those steps include:
Identify the digital devices or storage media containing data, metadata or other digital information relevant to the digital forensics investigation.
For criminal cases, law enforcement agencies seize the evidence from a potential crime scene to ensure a strict chain of custody.
To preserve evidence integrity, forensics teams make a forensic duplicate of the data by using a hard disk drive duplicator or forensic imaging tool.
After the duplication process, they secure the original data and conduct the rest of the investigation on the copies to avoid tampering.
Investigators comb through data and metadata for signs of cybercriminal activity.
Forensic examiners can recover digital data from various sources, including web browser histories, chat logs, remote storage devices and deleted or accessible disk spaces. They can also extract information from operating system caches and virtually any other part of a computerized system.
Forensic analysts use different methodologies and digital forensic tools to extract data and insights from digital evidence.
For instance, to uncover "hidden" data or metadata, they might use specialized forensic techniques, like live analysis, which evaluates still-running systems for volatile data. They might employ reverse steganography, a method that displays data hidden that uses steganography, which conceals sensitive information within ordinary-looking messages.
Investigators might also reference proprietary and open source tools to link findings to specific threat actors.
Once the investigation is over, forensic experts create a formal report that outlines their analysis, including what happened and who might be responsible.
Reports vary by case. For cybercrimes, they might have recommendations for fixing vulnerabilities to prevent future cyberattacks. Reports are also frequently used to present digital evidence in a court of law and shared with law enforcement agencies, insurers, regulators and other authorities.
When digital forensics emerged in the early 1980s, there were few formal digital forensics tools. Most forensics teams relied on live analysis, a notoriously tricky practice that posed a significant risk of tampering.
By the late 1990s, the growing demand for digital evidence led to the development of more sophisticated tools like EnCase and forensic toolkit (FTK). These tools enabled forensic analysts to examine copies of digital media without relying on live forensics.
Today, forensic experts employ a wide range of digital forensics tools. These tools can be hardware or software-based and analyze data sources without tampering with the data. Common examples include file analysis tools, which extract and analyze individual files, and registry tools, which gather information from Windows-based computing systems that catalog user activity in registries.
Certain providers also offer dedicated open source tools for specific forensic purposes—with commercial platforms, like Encase and CAINE, offering comprehensive functions and reporting capabilities. CAINE, specifically, boasts an entire Linux distribution tailored to the needs of forensic teams.
Digital forensics contains discrete branches based on the different sources of forensic data.
Some of the most popular branches of digital forensics include:
When computer forensics and incident response—the detection and mitigation of cyberattacks in progress—are conducted independently, they can interfere with each other and negatively impact an organization.
Incident response teams can alter or destroy digital evidence while removing a threat from the network. Forensic investigators can delay threat resolution while they hunt down and capture evidence.
Digital forensics and incident response, or DFIR, integrates computer forensics and incident response into a unified workflow to help information security teams combat cyberthreats more efficiently. At the same time, it ensures the preservation of digital evidence that might otherwise be lost in the urgency of threat mitigation.
DFIR can lead to faster threat mitigation, more robust threat recovery and improved evidence for investigating criminal cases, cybercrimes, insurance claims and other security incidents.