
There will undoubtedly be obligations to wider stakeholders too, such as regulators, insurers, customers or partners.

If you suspect personal data has been breached from your systems and there is a risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals, you are obligated to report it within 72 hours under the UK GDPR to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). And in fact, remediating from an attack too soon could jeopardise artefacts used to determine whether any data has been stolen. Without specialist tools or knowledge, it can be difficult to determine whether data has been stolen or exfiltrated from a system. from another company that may have been liable, or from an employee), and even when trying to make claims with insurance.īy reacting too quickly, not capturing logs and gathering vital digital evidence, organisation may be leaving themselves open to another attack in the future or throwing away any chance they had at settling litigation or legal matters. This can lead to problems, especially when trying to discover the root cause of the attack, when it comes to seeking legal remedies (e.g. Once an organisation has been compromised in an attack, there can often be pressure from senior management onto the IT team to remediate the issue as quickly as possible. Why is Digital Forensics Important for Cyber Incident Response Investigations can be instructed for HR & Employment, IP theft, fraud & forgery, but for the purposes of this article we will focus on the relationship between digital forensics and the following cyber incidents: Computer servers & network infrastructure.Theft of electronic intellectual property.Instant messaging & social media communication.Deleted files, folders, emails & messages.We are regularly instructed to retrieve and report on numerous forms of digital evidence, including but not limited to: We discuss computer forensics and digital forensics in more detail on our services page here, however, digital forensics broadly covers the acquisition and preservation of data from devices running modern operating system, across PCs, laptops, servers, mobile telephones, smart phones tablet devices, network and cloud infrastructure. Targeted attack: An attack specifically targeted at the business – usually by a sophisticated attacker (often encompassing several of the above categories).Data breach: Lost/stolen devices or hard copy documents, unauthorised access or extraction of data from the network (usually linked with some of the above).Insider: Malicious or accidental action by an employee causing a security incident.Unauthorised Access: Access to systems, accounts, data by an unauthorised person (internal or external) – for example access to someone’s emails or account.


In this article we look at the relationship between Incident Response and Digital Forensics
