“This is a must-have work for anybody in information security, digital forensics, or involved with incident handling. As we move away from traditional disk-based analysis into the interconnectivity of the cloud, Sherri and Jonathan have created a framework and roadmap that will act as a seminal work in this developing field.” – Dr. Craig S. Wright (GSE), Asia Pacific Director at Global Institute for Cyber Security + Research. “It’s like a symphony meeting an encyclopedia meeting a spy novel.” –Michael Ford, Corero Network Security On the Internet, every action leaves a mark–in routers, firewalls, web proxies, and within network traffic itself. When a hacker breaks into a bank, or an insider smuggles secrets to a competitor, evidence of the crime is always left behind. Learn to recognize hackers’ tracks and uncover network-based evidence in Network Tracking Hackers through Cyberspace. Carve suspicious email attachments from packet captures. Use flow records to track an intruder as he pivots through the network. Analyze a real-world wireless encryption-cracking attack (and then crack the key yourself). Reconstruct a suspect’s web surfing history–and cached web pages, too–from a web proxy. Uncover DNS-tunneled traffic. Dissect the Operation Aurora exploit, caught on the wire. Throughout the text, step-by-step case studies guide you through the analysis of network-based evidence. You can download the evidence files from the authors’ web site (lmgsecurity.com), and follow along to gain hands-on experience. Hackers leave footprints all across the Internet. Can you find their tracks and solve the case? Pick up Network Forensics and find out.
This book is extremely well written. You read it and you get a feeling of clarity and organization within a topic that is really messy and shifting.
To read this you should be aware of a few computer-science-y things first, like knowing what various protocols are, or you might find it too technical. You don't need to be a super-hacker -- just someone who knows as much as a sysadmin should know.
If you are new to the world of digital forensics, and more specifically network forensics, go no further : this is the book you need. That is provided you have some knowledge of networking.
With a lot of examples and detailed commands, the authors show you how to use opensource tools to dissect a packet capture or a log file to expose the smoking gun. Some of the examples come from the forensics challenges, others from real life.