How do malware authors use anti-forensic techniques?
Subsequently, malware authors began to incorporate anti-forensic techniques that subvert the analysis process by hiding malicious memory areas.
What is the basics of digital forensics?
The Basics of Digital Forensics provides a foundation for people new to the digital forensics field. This book teaches you how to conduct examinations by discussing what digital fo ... read full description Digital forensics has exploded over the last several years.
What are the different forensics tools?
Forensic tools come in a wide range of categories including hardware, software, commercial, and open source. Cases can be won or lost based on how the digital evidence was collected. Digital evidence is fragile and must be handled with care.
What is remote access security?
Remote access security begins with hardening the devices seeking to connect, as demonstrated in Chapter 6. We follow this with a selection of one or more remote access methods based on functional and technical requirements. Finally, we control access based on context.
What are the techniques to counter anti-forensics?
Evidence tampering.DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE. This method aims to eliminate evidence and make its recovery impossible. ... EVIDENCE HIDING. This method does not aim to manipulate or destroy evidence but make it as inaccessible as possible. ... ELIMINATION OF THE SOURCES OF EVIDENCE. ... EVIDENCE TAMPERING.
What are anti-forensics techniques in cyber security?
Anti-Forensics (AF) tools and techniques frustrate CFTs by erasing or altering information; creating “chaff” that wastes time and hides information; implicating innocent parties by planting fake evidence; exploiting implementation bugs in known tools; and by leaving “tracer” data that causes CFTs to inadvertently ...
What are some prevention anti-forensic measures offenders use?
Categories of Anti-Forensic Techniques Data Hiding – Encryption, steganography, file renaming, Windows ADS, covert channels, etc.
What are some of the legitimate uses of anti-forensics?
2.2 Anti-forensics Typically, one or more of the following strategies are used: data hiding, data destruction, trail obfuscation, data contraception, data fabrication, file system attacks [9].
Which of the following tools are anti-forensic tools?
In this article Explain different types of Anti-Forensics Tools which are using in forensic investigation.Steganography Studio. Source: http://stegstudio.sourceforge.net. ... CryptaPix. Source: http://www.briggsoft.com. ... GiliSoft File Lock Pro. Source: http://gilisoft.com. ... wbStego. ... Data Stash. ... OmniHide PRO. ... Masker. ... Deep Sound.More items...
Which of the following is the definition of anti-forensics?
Which of the following is the definition of anti-forensics? The actions that perpetrators take to conceal their locations, activities, or identities. Real evidence means physical objects that can be touched, held, or directly observed, such as a laptop with a suspect's fingerprints on it, or a handwritten note.
What is anti-forensics PDF?
Anti-forensics (AF) involves the use of. methods specifically designed prevent the use. of scientific methods and tools to collect and. analyse forensic artefacts for use in court. proceedings.
Why is encryption a concern in a cyber crime scene investigation?
Encryption is scrambling of information which makes decoding the original data impossible for third parties without knowledge of a decoding key. Encryption makes the potential evidence unreadable by forensic officers or investigators.
How Antiforensic techniques affect computer forensics file recovery and security?
Anti-forensic techniques are used by attackers to cover their tracks, allowing them to alter or delete the evidence. These techniques help them evade network security and launch attacks without forensics investigators detecting them. Anti-forensics techniques are designed to frustrate digital forensics investigators.
What is the main purpose of anti-forensics tools?
Anti-forensic tools can be used to erase the contents of a drive, making it difficult for forensic analysts to recover the data.
What is the impact of anti-forensics?
If an employee uses anti-forensics techniques in an effort to cover up illegal activities before their data is collected in an investigation, the time and cost of the investigation can increase drastically.
What are data hiding techniques?
Data hiding involves changing or manipulating a file to conceal information. Data- hiding techniques include hiding entire partitions, changing file extensions, setting file attributes to hidden, bit-shifting, using encryption, and setting up password protection.
What is whitelist approach?
Whitelist approach looks for things that match Blacklist approach suppresses things that donʼt Use a whitelist approach
Can you copy a device for later analysis?
Copy each device for later analysis ...or copy the file from the remote live machine
Do executable files need to be recalculated?
Most files wonʼt need a lot of work: simply change a character and youʼre good. Executable files (DLLs, EXEs) have embedded Cyclical Redundancy Checks (CRCs) that make sure they are still good You will need to recalculate the CRCs for these files in order to change them in a way that will keep them running
What is antiforensics?
Antiforensics is more than technology. It is an approach to criminal hacking that can be summed up like this: Make it hard for them to find you and impossible for them to prove they found you.
Why did Vincent Liu stop using forensic tools?
Vincent Liu, partner at Stach & Liu, has developed antiforensic tools. But he stopped because “the evidence exists that we can’t rely on forensic tools anymore. It was no longer necessary to drive the point home. There was no point rubbing salt in the wound,” he says.
What is MosDef memory?
In memory, stuff moves around; you can’t track it down.”. MosDef is one example of diskless antiforensics. It executes code in memory. Many rootkits now load into memory; some use the large stockpiles of memory found on graphics cards. Linux servers have become a favorite home for memory-.
What is diskless A-F?
If you want to go full-out cloak-and-dagger in your movie, you’d show off antiforensic tools that have gone solid-state. Diskless A-F is the state of the art; it avoids logging of activity all together. “There’s nothing on the disk that can’t be messed with,” says Liu. “So the arms race has left the disk and is moving into memory. Memory is volatile storage. It’s a lot more difficult to understand what’s going on in there. Disk layout is documented; you know where to look for stuff. In memory, stuff moves around; you can’t track it down.”
What would the bad guys do if they were making a movie about computer crime?
If you were making a movie about a computer crime, the bad guys would use antiforensics. And since it’s a movie, it should be exciting, so they’d use the clever and illicit antiforensic tools, the sexy ones with little or no legitimate business purpose.
Is forensics unrewarding?
So while requisite, forensics is ultimately unrewarding. A clear illustration of this fact comes from the field investigations manager for a major credit services company. Sometime last year, he noticed a clutch of fraudulent purchases on cards that all traced back to the same aquarium.
Is antiforensics new?
The concept of antiforensics is neither new nor foolproof, but in the past 12 months, forensic investigators have noticed a significant uptick in the use of antiforensics. This is not because hackers are making more sophisticated antiforensic tools, though some are.
What is first order incident detection?
First order incident detection is the traditional way to apply methods to identify intrusions. First order detection concentrates on discovering attacks during the reconnaissance (if any) and exploitation phases of compromise.
Why do incident responders pull the plug?
Twenty years ago incident responders were taught to locate a potentially compromised computer and literally, physically, "pull the plug." The idea was to eliminate the possibility that an intruder occupying a compromised system could notice a normal shutdown and implement techniques to evade detection. Incident responders also worried that intruders might have planted rogue code that started cleanup routines upon initiation of a shutdown command.
What is a CIRT level 4?
The CIRT develops some degree of formal capability to detect and respond to intrusions. Level 4. The CIRT is the primary means for detecting incidents. All or nearly all of the data sources one could hope to use for detection, response, and forensics are available.
How many maturity levels are there in detection?
A complementary way to think about detection takes the form of six maturity levels. Using the ideas below, you can determine how advanced your detection initiative may be.
Is forensics more effective than historical methods?
In addition to focusing on just the material that matters, modern incident response and forensic processes are more rapid and effective than historical methods . When hard drives were 40MB in size, it was feasible for a moderately skilled investigator to fairly thoroughly examine all of the relevant data for signs of wrongdoing. With today's volume of malicious activity, hard drive size, and efforts to evade investigators (counter- and anti-forensics, for example), live response with selective retrieval and review are powerful techniques.
Can forensic investigators duplicate hard drives?
Increasingly it is just not technically possible or cost effective to do so. Judges, agents, and investigators who were taught that only a "bit for bit copy" was a "forensically sound copy" will have to wake up to the expansive nature of today's digital environment. Why copy a 2-terabyte RAID array on a server if cursory analysis reveals that a small set of files provides all of the necessary evidence to make a sound case? Expect greater use of "remote previews" during incident response and select retrieval of important files for forensic analysis.
Do intruders exploit enterprises?
Despite twenty years of practical experience trying to prevent compromise, intruders continue to exploit enterprises at will. While they may not be successful attacking any specific asset (unless inordinate resources are applied), in aggregate intruders will always find at least one viable avenue for exploitation. The maxim that "prevention eventually fails" holds for any enterprise of sufficient size, complexity, and asset value to attract an intruder's attention. The threshold has fallen to the point where a single home PC is now considered "worthy" of the same sorts of attacks levied against multibillion-dollar conglomerates.
Why do criminals use anti-forensic methods?
However, criminals may use anti-forensic methods to work against the process or interfere with the evidence itself. Solving anti-forensic issues will require that we understand the actual problem itself.
What is the act of removing evidence from view?
3.2. Hiding evidence. Hiding evidence is the act of removing evidence from view so that it is less likely to be incorporated into the forensic process.
What is the meaning of "counterfeiting evidence"?
with intent to deceive” ( Merriam-Webster's, 2003 ). Consequently, evidence counterfeiting is the act of creating a “faked” version of the evidence which is designed to appear to be something else.
What is compromised evidence availability?
Compromising evidence availability includes any attempts to prevent evidence from existing, hiding existing evidence or otherwise manipulating evidence to ensure that it is no longer within reach of the investigator. Usefulness maybe compromised by obliterating the evidence itself or by destroying its integrity. 3.
Why can evidence be destroyed?
Evidence can be destroyed to prevent it from being found or to reduce its usefulness if it is found. Evidence can be hidden from casual view to reduce its availability to the investigator. Possible sources of evidence can be eliminated to ensure that evidence never gets created in the first place.
How does source elimination work?
Evidence source elimination involves neutralizing evidentiary sources. There is no need to destroy evidence since it is never created. In the physical world, source elimination could be as simple as wearing rubber gloves to commit a crime. However, the actual process of source elimination could itself create evidence, as evidence destruction can. The rubber gloves used to hold the gun might become evidence, for example. Additionally, the very lack of evidence might become evidence. This sounds counterintuitive until we consider a gun completely devoid of fingerprints. A good investigator may think that the criminal wore gloves, so he might assume that the murder was carefully planned. These observations apply to the digital world as well.
What is evidence manipulation?
Guidelines. 1. Introduction. Locard's principle states that when a crime is committed, there is a cross-transfer of evidence between the scene and the perpetrator ( Saferstein, 1998 ). Forensic investigation endeavors to use science to uncover the transferred evidence and discern its meaning.
What is the countermeasure a rootkit may implement?
The obvious countermeasure a rootkit may implement is to prevent our driver from being loaded into kernel mode – for example, by hooking the Service Control Manager (SCM) interface.
Can you run a memory map in real mode?
As discussed in Section 2.1, obtaining the physical memory map via BIOS or EFI service routines can only be run in real mode, and this can only be done early in the operating system's boot sequence.
Can forensic agents be trusted?
It is commonly believed that running any software, and especially a forensic agent, on a compromised system can not be trusted since the system may be hooked so as to “lie” to the forensic tool. Since memory acquisition tools must run on potentially compromised systems, they must be vulnerable to subversion by a pre-installed malware. However, we believe this view fails to take into account the practical aspects of rootkit engineering - which are to maintain system stability and hide from forensic agents.
Why do analysts depend on forensic tools?
1.1. Motivation. Today, analysts depend on a variety of forensic tools to generate correct analysis results during forensic investigations. As most forensic tools rely on the integrity of certain kernel structures, they appear to be prone to the manipulation of these data.
Where does malware reside?
Nowadays, modern malware mostly resides in volatile memory and can only be observed in a running state, potentially compromising the analysis process. Consequently, investigators began to use memory acquisition or forensic live analysis to detect and analyze potential threats.
What is the user space?
While the first maps an operating system's kernel, and is the same for every virtual address space, the user space appears as the memory range actually accessible by a process. Therefore, the user space is also denoted as the process address space or process memory.
What is memory forensics?
Memory forensics means the process of acquiring physical memory, which contains volatile data, and collecting evidence from the acquired memory image. Since the Digital Forensic Research Conference memory challenge ( Dfrws, 2005) opened in 2005, the extraction of volatile data such as disk encryption key ( Mrdovic and Huseinovic, 2011) and user input information ( Olajide et al., 2012 ), as well as the process list ( Betz, 2005 ), has been researched. Memory forensics has become important in digital forensics in that it can extract these volatile data, which is impossible from a hard disk.
Why is the process list extracted?
Extraction of the process list is a main and common function among modern memory forensic tools because the EPROCESS's instance contains and points to a number of other related data such as thread, module and object table information. Therefore, we show how to extract active process list from the KiInitialPCR.
What is application control policy?
Application control policies can restrict the use of Powershell to those who shouldn’t need access in their role, stopping any Powershell attack in its tracks.
Why do we allow listing alone?
If an end-user’s role requires them to create or introduce their own scripts, allow listing alone may prevent them from being productive. To reduce the risk this role presents, advanced application control ( Trusted Application Protection) can create a safety net for even the most ‘cyber aware’ techies. For example, if PowerShell is launched as a child process to a content reader, in a social engineering attack, it can be blocked. If launched by the user via File Explorer, the application runs as expected.
Is PowerShell a trusted application?
The issue is that PowerShell is generally treated as a trusted application by security software – heck, it’s part of Windows – so it has become increasingly popular for malware authors to leverage PowerShell in order to slip bad stuff onto good machines.
