Understanding the role of attribution in an investigation

When a cyber-crime has occurred, both attribution and investigation processes are carried out after the attack. Attribution helps us to determine who performed the attack, such as identifying the threat actor or hacker. Being able to identify an attacker allows us to take legal action against the culprit for performing malicious actions on the victim's system or network. This information is gathered after an attack has occurred on the system. As mentioned in previous sections, a hacker always leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, which helps us trace an attack back to the threat actor.

One of the many challenges cybersecurity professionals face during attribution is actually tracing an attack back to the threat actor. If a cyber-attack occurred through the internet, you can trace the attack back to a source Internet Protocol (IP) address. However, we need to keep in mind that the person behind the attack may be a...