Digital Forensics: Fundamentals of Network Forensics

Network Forensics is a systematic method of identifying sources of security incidents in the network. The method for identifying sources of security incidents includes capturing, recording, and analysis of network events by analysis of event logs. The Network Forensics Appliance (NFA) automates the whole process of collecting evidence of security incidents.

Network Forensics is very helpful in identifying the source of security incidents, what is the path of intrusion, the method used by an attacker to enter a network, and what traces and evidence left by the attacker.

Popular Network Attacks

(1) Distributed Denial of Service (DoS)

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is the most popular attack used by attackers to disrupt the services of the victim organization. This attack can be performed by using different tools to craft malicious packets against a target. Click Here to learn more about DDoS attack types and possible mitigation techniques for the prevention of such attacks.

(2) Eavesdropping

This type of attack allows attackers to capture and analyze network traffic that belongs to the victim. If network traffic is not encrypted, an attacker easily sees the network traffic by using different tools and is able to extract secrets like usernames, passwords, etc.

(3) Spoofing

This type of attack allows the impersonation of the victim and sends malicious packets to the destination.

How to Secure a Network?

There are many methods and procedures as mentioned below to secure a network from any type of attack.

(1) Update all software components installed on the IT device

Most of the attacks use existing vulnerabilities to attack critical infrastructures. If all the software components are patched, most of the attacks are automatically mitigated from happening.

(2) Authentication of Users

Never allow unknowns in the organization's secure network Always authenticate the users before allowing anyone in the network. Once authenticated, the firewall and network devices enforce security policies to access the internal network.

Tools Used for Network Forensics

(1) Wireshark

Wireshark is an open-source packet analyzer tool. This tool is very helpful in analyzing traffic on the network. Click Here to learn more about Wireshark Tool.

(2) NetworkMiner

NetworkMiner is a network forensics tool used to detect artifacts, such as files, images, emails, and passwords, from captured network traffic in PCAP files.

(3) TCPDump

TCPDump is a similar tool to Wireshark. The only difference between Wireshark and TCPDump is the user interface. Click Here to learn more about TCPDump.

(4) TShark

TShark is a command line-based tool similar to Wireshark. Most of the functionality is available in TShark. Click Here to learn more about TShark.