Network-based data collection

Nowadays, it is difficult enough to find computers that don't have any network connections. This is almost impossible in the enterprise environment. Network connections reflect the interaction of computers with the outer world. Also, the network is the main source of threats. Today, the Internet is a very aggressive environment. Threats of various levels from spam to APT often penetrate computers via networks.

So, in almost every incident, computers have network activities that are related to the incident. There are a lot of examples of such events from receiving e-mails with malicious attachments and visits of a malicious URL. However, sometimes to have only host-based evidence to get a whole picture about an incident is not enough. In such cases, network-based evidence can help a lot.

Network forensics is a vast topic. We won't cover all the issues. In this chapter, we just want to look at this as an additional source of evidence. There is a lot of...