As the field of cyber forensics keeps on growing, it has become a legal entity that is used in law enforcement for crimes related to information technology. It provides trusted evidence for cybercrime through cyber forensics solutions to track the malicious activities to get valid information to help uncover the unknown in a given crime. 

Cyber forensics planning is intricate, it demands attention to detail and a holistic approach to cumulate and analyze the digital evidence. The expert must employ modern methods and advanced tools to study the facts, data and make a definite cyber forensic plan.

While extracting the evidence, the investigator must use the technological tools and platform to unveil the evidence. To carry out the task, you must have a guide to follow to have a thorough investigation while revealing what inspired the culprit to indulge in criminal activities. With this blog, you will explore the planning guide that you can follow for data extraction in cyber forensics. Now let’s dive deeper.

Cyber Forensics Plan of Actions

Procedure And Policy Development 

In cyber forensics, you usually deal with highly sensitive and delicate data. It is the data that will provide digital evidence to the crime. Therefore, you need to establish the procedures or guidelines to guide you during the investigation. The plan for cyber forensic research should be driven by definite objectives. It should be crisp and to the point. The expert one must follow the standard process and policies for data extraction and cyber forensics solutions.

Evidence Assessment

Evidence assessment is crucial. It gives one an overview about the crime. It enables one to comprehend the situation and join the pieces together. Evidence assessment can play a prominent role in deciding the course of an investigation. Before the investigation, you need to plan how to assess the evidence you will extract in a given crime. To do so, first, you have to understand the crime at hand to establish the proper method to use to do the assessment.

Evidence Acquisition 

It would help if you had a detailed plan to guide you in data extraction. Here, you will have to detail the data acquisition process and how you will do it legally and deliberately. Evidence acquisition must be tactical. One must move beyond conventional methods and employ an analytical approach to acquire the evidence and preserve them. Some popular evidence acquisition methods include cloning, copying data from disk to disk, sparse data copy, acquiring images from smartphones, laptops, desktops etc. 

Evidence Examination 

To get potential evidence, you must have a plan in place that will guide you in retrieving, storing, copying, and many other activities. With this plan, the investigators will know the method or the approach to be used to analyze the data. The policy and procedure created for the Digital forensic plan must be followed at this stage. The expert must abide by the standard process and policy framed during this stage to draw and report conclusions. 

Reporting And Documenting

Reporting is one of the most important stages. It is documenting the findings of the investigation. The reporting must include a complete process of investigation along with the outcome of the same. The reporting and documenting must be transparent. It must give a complete overview of the case and digital forensic solution. The report and documentation should be done in the specified format. It must be comprehensive and easy to scan. 

How Is This Data Extracted And Analyzed

For data extraction, the investigators mainly extract the electronically stored data. They first acquire the device that is under investigation. Second, they have to image the device storage media or any data source link from the device. When they have the digital copy of the device, they start conducting the data extraction using various forensic data extraction tools.

After acquiring the data, this data is sometimes in a format that is not even readable to human beings. Therefore they will have to use other tools to process the data further. These tools sometimes provide some hidden information that could provide more insight into the crime.

Why Is Cyber Forensics Important To Business?

There is much importance why cyber forensic solutions are essential to business, and here are some of the importance.

• It is used to identify the intent and the cause of the cybercrime
• It is used to safeguard the evidence before it becomes obsolete
• Identifying the unauthorized access to their network
• Geolocating or mapping the logins to their systems.

Strategies To Assemble Summary Of Data

• Handling  The Evidence

Put in place a strategy that will guide the different experts or departments to handle the data before it assembles so that the evidence cannot be interfered with. 

• Acquiring The Analyzed Data 

Different teams or tools are used to analyze the data. Therefore you need to devise a way in which this summary data from a different source can be compiled together under one platform.

• Evidence Preservation

Here you have to devise the ways that you will use to protect the evidence so that no one can modify it.

Conclusion

The above is the cyber forensics planning guide for data extraction that you can follow. As in every business, planning is one of the crucial things you must have. Therefore as cyber forensic experts, you may consider having a plan and following it to make the process easy and successful.