Digital forensics capability is the organizational ability to collect, preserve, analyze, and present digital evidence from computing systems, networks, and storage media in a manner that maintains legal admissibility and operational integrity. This mission exists because breaches, insider incidents, and compliance investigations all require evidence. Without a structured forensics function, organizations destroy evidence through routine operations, fail to meet legal discovery obligations, and lose the factual foundation needed to understand what actually happened during an incident. TID-B02 establishes the people, processes, and tools required to conduct forensic investigations repeatably, defensibly, and without disrupting ongoing operations. It is a foundational capability within CDA's Threat Intelligence Domain.
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Digital forensics is the application of scientifically derived and proven methods toward the preservation, collection, validation, identification, analysis, interpretation, documentation, and presentation of digital evidence. The discipline originates in law enforcement but has expanded into corporate incident response, regulatory compliance, and civil litigation support.
TID-B02 covers four primary evidence types: disk forensics (imaging and analysis of storage media), memory forensics (volatile RAM capture and analysis), network forensics (packet capture, flow analysis, log reconstruction), and cloud forensics (evidence collection from SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS environments where traditional imaging is not possible).
Digital forensics is distinct from incident response, although the two overlap. Incident response is concerned with containing and remediating a threat; forensics is concerned with understanding what happened, who did it, and how, in a way that can withstand scrutiny. Forensics without incident response produces knowledge but no remediation. Incident response without forensics produces remediation but no defensible record.
Digital forensics is NOT the same as security monitoring, threat hunting, or log review. Those activities detect and investigate threats in real time. Forensics operates on preserved evidence and applies rigorous chain of custody controls that distinguish it from operational analysis.
Subtypes include: live forensics (evidence collected from a running system without shutdown), dead-box forensics (evidence collected from powered-off media), mobile device forensics, and database forensics. Each subtype requires specific tooling and methodology. Organizations that conflate these variants often invalidate evidence through improper collection procedures.
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Evidence identification and scoping. A forensic investigation begins with defining what is being investigated and where relevant evidence may reside. In a ransomware incident, relevant evidence includes endpoint disk images, memory captures from affected systems, Active Directory logs, network flow data, email server logs, and backup system records. Scoping determines which systems are in scope, which evidence types are required, and what legal or regulatory constraints apply (for example, privacy laws governing employee device searches in certain jurisdictions).
Forensic imaging. Before any analysis occurs, evidence must be preserved in a forensically sound manner. For physical media, this means creating a bit-for-bit copy using a write blocker, a hardware or software tool that prevents any writes to the source media during the imaging process. The industry-standard tools for disk imaging include FTK Imager and dc3dd. After imaging, the investigator generates cryptographic hash values (SHA-256 is current standard practice; MD5 is no longer sufficient alone) for both the original media and the image. These hashes are documented and become part of the chain of custody record.
Chain of custody documentation. Chain of custody is the chronological record of who collected, handled, transferred, and analyzed evidence. Every action taken on evidence must be documented with the date, time, person responsible, and a description of what was done. This documentation is not bureaucratic overhead; it is the mechanism by which evidence is made admissible in legal proceedings and defensible in regulatory investigations. A gap in chain of custody can disqualify evidence from use in litigation.
Memory forensics. Volatile memory capture must occur before a system is powered down, because RAM content is lost on shutdown. Tools such as Magnet RAM Capture, WinPmem, or LiME (Linux Memory Extractor) create a raw dump of system memory. Analysis of memory dumps reveals running processes, active network connections, encryption keys loaded in memory, injected code, and attacker tools that never touched disk. In a real-world scenario: during a 2021 financial sector incident, responders captured memory from a compromised server before reimaging. Analysis of the memory dump revealed a fileless malware loader operating entirely in process memory, with no corresponding disk artifact. Without memory forensics, the attack vector would have remained unknown.
Network forensics. When endpoint evidence is unavailable or has been wiped, network forensics can reconstruct attacker activity from packet captures, NetFlow data, DNS query logs, and proxy logs. The process involves identifying the timeframe of interest, extracting relevant traffic, and reassembling sessions to identify data exfiltration, lateral movement, or command-and-control communication. Wireshark, Zeek, and NetworkMiner are common analysis tools.
Cloud forensics. Cloud environments present distinct challenges. Organizations cannot physically image a virtual machine in a cloud provider's infrastructure. Instead, forensic procedures rely on: taking snapshots of virtual machine disks (which must be done before the instance is terminated or modified), collecting cloud provider logs (AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs, GCP Audit Logs), and preserving API call records. Cloud providers have specific forensic acquisition guides; investigators who do not follow provider-specific procedures risk missing evidence or violating provider terms of service.
Analysis and reporting. Once evidence is collected and preserved, analysis proceeds against specific investigative questions: What was the initial access vector? What did the attacker do after gaining access? What data was accessed or exfiltrated? How long was the attacker present? Analysis tools include Autopsy, X-Ways Forensics, Volatility (for memory analysis), and SIEM platforms for log correlation. The investigation concludes with a written report documenting findings, methodology, tools used, evidence references, and conclusions. Reports must be written to serve both technical and non-technical audiences, as they are frequently reviewed by legal counsel, executives, and regulators.
Implementation consideration. Organizations should pre-position forensic toolkits on endpoints using endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms that include forensic collection capabilities. Waiting until an incident occurs to acquire and configure tools wastes critical time and risks evidence loss. Pre-deployment also allows hash-verified, tamper-evident collection that strengthens admissibility.
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Organizations without structured digital forensics capability routinely discover the gap at the worst possible moment: when they are legally compelled to produce evidence, when regulators demand proof of what occurred, or when insurers require a forensic report to process a claim. At that point, the absence of preserved evidence is not a technical inconvenience; it is a legal and financial liability.
A concrete example: In the 2020 SolarWinds breach, many affected organizations struggled to determine whether threat actors had accessed specific data because their log retention policies were insufficient and forensic artifacts had been overwritten by routine operations. Organizations with mature forensics capabilities, including pre-positioned collection tools and defined evidence preservation procedures, were able to scope their exposure within days. Others spent months in uncertainty, incurring legal fees, extended incident response costs, and reputational harm from incomplete disclosures.
Without forensics capability, incident response produces incomplete findings. Teams may remove malware and restore systems without understanding the full attack chain, leaving residual access or secondary backdoors in place. This explains why organizations without forensics capability frequently experience repeat compromises from the same attacker.
A common misconception is that forensics is only relevant when legal proceedings are anticipated. This is incorrect. Forensics produces the factual record that informs remediation decisions. Knowing that an attacker had access for 47 days, moved laterally to six systems, and exfiltrated data through an encrypted channel to a specific IP address changes remediation priorities and scope entirely compared to assuming a contained, localized compromise.
Another misconception is that cloud environments are forensically opaque. Cloud providers offer extensive logging and snapshotting capabilities, but organizations must configure them in advance. Default logging configurations in most cloud environments do not capture sufficient detail for forensic investigation.
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CDA addresses TID-B02 through the Planetary Defense Model (PDM), which organizes defensive capability development into structured domains. The Threat Intelligence Domain (TID) encompasses the collection, analysis, and application of information about threats, including the forensic capability required to reconstruct threat activity from evidence.
CDA's methodology, Predictive Defense Intelligence (PDI), operates on the principle of "See the threat before it sees you." Within TID-B02, this means CDA does not wait for an incident to build forensic capability. The PDI methodology positions forensic readiness as a proactive discipline: pre-deploying collection infrastructure, establishing evidence preservation playbooks, and conducting forensic readiness assessments before incidents occur.
Specifically, CDA's approach to TID-B02 includes:
Forensic readiness scoring. CDA assesses organizations against a defined forensic readiness baseline that covers log retention adequacy, collection tool deployment, chain of custody procedures, and investigator training. The score produces a gap map, not a general observation, but a specific inventory of what is missing and what it would take to close each gap.
Pre-positioned collection playbooks. CDA develops environment-specific collection procedures that map to the organization's actual infrastructure: which systems require memory capture, which cloud accounts require snapshot automation, which log sources require extended retention. These playbooks are tested before they are needed.
Evidence preservation automation. For organizations with cloud-heavy environments, CDA configures automated snapshot and log export procedures triggered by detection events. This removes human latency from the evidence preservation step, which is the most time-sensitive part of any forensic investigation.
Integration with threat intelligence. CDA connects forensic findings back into the threat intelligence cycle. Evidence collected during an investigation informs detection rules, threat actor profiles, and predictive models used to anticipate future activity. Forensics, in this model, is not a terminal activity but a feedback mechanism that improves future defenses.
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