Examining evidence

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Forensic services and ethical hackers perform crucial roles in ensuring continuing organisational security. With an ongoing recession to handle, however, the Middle East might have to wait another year before adoption increases.

In the labs, forensics implies the tasks involved in taking apart a particular crime after its incidence to understand how and why it was perpetrated. This is done with the ultimate aim of using the evidence to bring in the criminal.

In information technology, forensic services involve similar ambitions and goals.

“Cyber forensics is the term used for the technology related to forensics activities. It is the application of investigation and analysis techniques used to gather evidence which is to be presented in a court of law or relevant authorities to arrive at a conclusion after a particular incident,” says Ahmed Baig, head of business management and advisory services at eHosting DataFort (eHDF).

“Cyber forensics employs digital evidence from multiple areas such as deleted files or erased partitions on hard drives and other memory storage devices, reviewing log files from various devices like firewalls, intrusion prevention, as well as security events and information management (SEIM) tools,” continues Baig.

There are others in the industry who believe that forensic services can incorporate both post-event analysis as well as prevention techniques.

“Certain expressions can mean different things to different people. I think for many businesses you could bring this down to one of two things. It is either pre-emptive analysis of their environment, which many people do and is called penetration testing. This is basically going into an organisation and looking for weaknesses that could lead to some sort of security breach and that can be everything from the technical, to implementation and processes. Equally we could be called in after the fact as well to understand how and why things have been done, to help them understand how security is achieved and to make sure that it is not done again in the future,” opines Greg Day, EMEA security analyst, McAfee Avert Labs.

While most security companies offer penetration testing as a service in the region, there are also a few that offer forensic services to analyse what went wrong after a particular attack.

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