The Incident Responder’s Job

Free lesson 1 of 8 from Digital Forensics & Incident Response — After the breach: analyse the capture, the malware and the persistence — reconstruct the whole attack.. No account, no card.

Something happened. Prove what.

SOC catches attacks live in the logs; DFIR comes after — you're handed artifacts (a disk, a memory dump, a packet capture, a suspicious file) and must reconstruct what happened, how, and what was taken, without contaminating the evidence.

🎯 Your case

Your lab ships a crime scene. Open the Live-Lab and read the case file:

cat ~/dfir/TICKET.txt
ls -la ~/dfir/evidence/     # traffic.pcap · update.bin (+ host: /etc/cron.d)
🎯 Challenge: Read the ticket. What three artifact types were you given, and what question does each one help answer?
Show solution

A pcap (what went over the wire — creds, exfil), a binary (what malware did — strings, behaviour), and cron (how the attacker persists). Network + host + persistence: the three pillars of an intrusion.

⚖️ Handle only evidence you're authorized to. In real IR, preserve originals and work on copies.

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