Digital Forensics Playbook

Digital forensics identifies and preserves digital evidence for legal use. By recovering data from diverse sources, investigators track trails vital for solving cybercrimes, managing network intrusions, and ensuring compliance. It is a key pillar of modern security and data recovery.

This book systematically guides you through enterprise readiness, legal compliance, and setting up forensic environments using Python and PowerShell. You will master evidence acquisition across Windows, Linux, and macOS, while exploring network analysis, memory forensics, and malware dissection with Sysinternals and VirusTotal. The book also explores case management with Autopsy, mobile forensics for Android and iOS, and bit-for-bit disk imaging. Featuring over 100 practical recipes, you will learn professional DFIR reporting and cloud-native evidence collection within AWS and Azure.

By the end of this book, readers will have the essential digital forensics skills to investigate, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks while preserving evidence for legal, regulatory, or internal use. Existing cybersecurity professionals will find it easy to acquire these skills, helping them achieve their digital forensics career goals.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● Understanding of core principles, concepts, and processes of digital forensics.
● Identifying, preserving, and presenting digital evidence in a court of law.
● Maintaining a strict chain of custody.
● Hands-on knowledge of tools, techniques, and approaches used by digital forensics professionals.
● Hands-on approaches to analyzing and investigating digital forensics cases and incidents.
● The fundamental, blended disciplines of digital forensics and incident response.
● Reconstructing system timelines.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is for cybersecurity professionals, CHFI aspirants, system administrators, and DevSecOps engineers seeking automated forensic skills. It serves researchers, faculty, and students needing practical expertise in Windows, Linux, and cloud forensics. Basic familiarity with computer systems and security is recommended.

1. Introduction to Digital Forensics
2. Digital Forensics for Enterprises
3. General Digital Forensics Techniques
4. Development Environment for Digital Forensics
5. Linux Forensics
6. Windows Forensics
7. Network Forensics
8. Memory Forensics
9. Malware Forensics
10. Working with Digital Forensics Cases
11. Mobile Forensics
12. Imaging Techniques
13. Digital Forensics and Incident Response
14. Cloud Forensics

Nishant Krishna is an entrepreneur, writer, and inventor who loves exploring and using new ways to solve complex problems in cybersecurity, cyber forensics, system programming, cognitive computing, computer vision, and product scaling to hyper-scale levels.

In his 25+ year software development career, he has created many software products from scratch, working in
various technical roles across architecture, cybersecurity, API development, anti-counterfeiting technologies, cloud and virtualization, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning. Apart from his day-to-day work, he also works on core research in cybersecurity and cognitive computing. In cybersecurity, his focus is on cyber forensics and vulnerability assessment.

In his consulting role, he advises many companies on making their enterprises ready for cyber forensics evidence collection, product development, threat-surface reduction, database and application scalability, and the use of standard processes to deliver high-quality products.
As a leader, he works with, manages, and influences people across organizations to deliver high-quality products and services. He has been working with multiple large teams at any given time and bringing out the best in them to support the organization's success.

Nishant is also an adjunct professor teaching cybersecurity, cyber forensics, cognitive computing, and databases to students and faculty in multiple prestigious institutions. As part of his teaching assignments, he seeks innovative, hands-on ways to teach complex concepts.