What Is Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR)? Digital forensics and incident response are branches of cybersecurity that involve identifying, investigating, containing, remediating and potentially testifying related to cyberattacks, litigations or other digital investigations.

DFIR provides a deep understanding of cybersecurity incidents through a comprehensive forensic process. DFIR experts gather and investigate vast amounts of data to fill in gaps of information about cyber attacks, such as who were the attackers, how they broke in, and the exact steps they took to place systems at risk. In the event of a successful breach, DFIR can also help identify the data lost or exact damage caused [expand title=”Read More” swaptitle=”Read Less”]DFIR capabilities typically include: Forensic collection gathering, examining, and analyzing data from networks, applications, data stores, and endpoints, both on-premises and in the cloud. Triage and investigation—determining whether the organization has been breached and identifying the root cause, scope, timeline, and impact of the incident. Notification and reporting—depending on the organization’s compliance obligations, there may be a need to notify and report on breaches to compliance bodies. In addition, depending on the severity of the incident, there may be a need to notify authorities like the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the US. Incident follow up—depending on the nature of the incident, there may be a need to negotiate with attackers, communicate incident status to stakeholders, customers, and the press, and make changes to systems and processes to address vulnerabilities.[/expand]