Systematic Memory Forensic Analysis of Ransomware using Digital Forensic Tools

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-81
Author(s):  
Paul Joseph ◽  
Jasmine Norman

Cybercrimes catastrophically caused great financial loss in the year 2018 as powerful obfuscated malware known as ransomware continued to be a continual threat to governments and organizations. Advanced malwares capable of system encryption with sophisticated obscure keys left organizations paying the ransom that hackers demand. Since every individual is vulnerable to this assault, cyber forensics play a vital role either in educating society or combating the attacks. As cyber forensics is classified into many subdomains, memory forensics is the domain that leads in curbing these types of attacks. This article gives insight on importance of memory forensics and provides widespread analysis on working of ransomware, recognizes the workflow, provides the ways to overcome this attack. Furthermore, this article implements user defined rules by integrating into powerful search tools known as YARA to detect and prevent the ransomware attacks.

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regner Sabillon ◽  
Jordi Serra-Ruiz ◽  
Victor Cavaller ◽  
Jeimy J. Cano

This paper reviews the existing methodologies and best practices for digital investigations phases like collecting, evaluating and preserving digital forensic evidence and chain of custody of cybercrimes. Cybercriminals are adopting new strategies to launch cyberattacks within modified and ever changing digital ecosystems, this article proposes that digital investigations must continually readapt to tackle cybercrimes and prosecute cybercriminals, working in international collaboration networks, sharing prevention knowledge and lessons learned. The authors also introduce a compact cyber forensics model for diverse technological ecosystems called Cyber Forensics Model in Digital Ecosystems (CFMDE). Transferring the knowledge, international collaboration, best practices and adopting new digital forensic tools, methodologies and techniques will be hereinafter paramount to obtain digital evidence, enforce organizational cybersecurity policies, mitigate security threats, fight anti-forensics practices and indict cybercriminals. The global Digital Forensics community ought to constantly update current practices to deal with cybercriminality and foreseeing how to prepare to new technological environments where change is always constant.


2018 ◽  
pp. 588-600
Author(s):  
Regner Sabillon ◽  
Jordi Serra-Ruiz ◽  
Victor Cavaller ◽  
Jeimy J. Cano

This paper reviews the existing methodologies and best practices for digital investigations phases like collecting, evaluating and preserving digital forensic evidence and chain of custody of cybercrimes. Cybercriminals are adopting new strategies to launch cyberattacks within modified and ever changing digital ecosystems, this article proposes that digital investigations must continually readapt to tackle cybercrimes and prosecute cybercriminals, working in international collaboration networks, sharing prevention knowledge and lessons learned. The authors also introduce a compact cyber forensics model for diverse technological ecosystems called Cyber Forensics Model in Digital Ecosystems (CFMDE). Transferring the knowledge, international collaboration, best practices and adopting new digital forensic tools, methodologies and techniques will be hereinafter paramount to obtain digital evidence, enforce organizational cybersecurity policies, mitigate security threats, fight anti-forensics practices and indict cybercriminals. The global Digital Forensics community ought to constantly update current practices to deal with cybercriminality and foreseeing how to prepare to new technological environments where change is always constant.


Data ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (8) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Sara Ferreira ◽  
Mário Antunes ◽  
Manuel E. Correia

Deepfake and manipulated digital photos and videos are being increasingly used in a myriad of cybercrimes. Ransomware, the dissemination of fake news, and digital kidnapping-related crimes are the most recurrent, in which tampered multimedia content has been the primordial disseminating vehicle. Digital forensic analysis tools are being widely used by criminal investigations to automate the identification of digital evidence in seized electronic equipment. The number of files to be processed and the complexity of the crimes under analysis have highlighted the need to employ efficient digital forensics techniques grounded on state-of-the-art technologies. Machine Learning (ML) researchers have been challenged to apply techniques and methods to improve the automatic detection of manipulated multimedia content. However, the implementation of such methods have not yet been massively incorporated into digital forensic tools, mostly due to the lack of realistic and well-structured datasets of photos and videos. The diversity and richness of the datasets are crucial to benchmark the ML models and to evaluate their appropriateness to be applied in real-world digital forensics applications. An example is the development of third-party modules for the widely used Autopsy digital forensic application. This paper presents a dataset obtained by extracting a set of simple features from genuine and manipulated photos and videos, which are part of state-of-the-art existing datasets. The resulting dataset is balanced, and each entry comprises a label and a vector of numeric values corresponding to the features extracted through a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). The dataset is available in a GitHub repository, and the total amount of photos and video frames is 40,588 and 12,400, respectively. The dataset was validated and benchmarked with deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) methods; however, a plethora of other existing ones can be applied. Generically, the results show a better F1-score for CNN when comparing with SVM, both for photos and videos processing. CNN achieved an F1-score of 0.9968 and 0.8415 for photos and videos, respectively. Regarding SVM, the results obtained with 5-fold cross-validation are 0.9953 and 0.7955, respectively, for photos and videos processing. A set of methods written in Python is available for the researchers, namely to preprocess and extract the features from the original photos and videos files and to build the training and testing sets. Additional methods are also available to convert the original PKL files into CSV and TXT, which gives more flexibility for the ML researchers to use the dataset on existing ML frameworks and tools.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 82-97
Author(s):  
Patryk Szewczyk ◽  
Krishnun Sansurooah ◽  
Patricia A. H. Williams

Consumers demand fast, high capacity, upgradeable memory cards for portable electronic devices, with secure digital (SD) and microSD the most popular. Despite this demand, secure erasure of data is still not a composite part of disposure practices. To investigate the extent of this problem, second-hand memory cards were procured from the Australian eBay site between 2011 and 2015. Digital forensic tools were used to acquire and analyze each memory card to determine the type and quantity of remnant data. This paper presents the results of the 2014 and 2015 studies and compares these findings to the 2011–2013 research studies. The longitudinal comparison indicates resold memory cards are disposed insecurely, with personal, confidential and business data undeleted or easily recoverable. The impact of such discoveries, where information is placed in the public domain, has the potential to cause embarrassment and financial loss to individuals, business, and government organizations.


Cryptographic hash functions are which transform any long message to fixed-length data. It seeks to ensure the confidentiality of the data through the cryptographic hash. The digital forensic tool is a method for extracting information from various storage devices, such as hard drives, memory. SHA-1 and SHA-2 methods are both widely used in forensic image archives. The hash method is usually used during evidence processing, the checking of forensic images (duplicate evidence), then at the completion of the analysis again to ensure data integrity and forensic evaluation of evidence. There was a vulnerability called a collision in the hashing algorithm in which two independent messages had the same hash values. While SHA-3 is secure than its former counterparts, the processors for general purposes are being slow and are not yet so popular. This task proposes a basic yet successful framework to meet the needs of cyber forensics, combining hash functions with other cryptographic concepts, for instance, SALT, such as modified secured hash algorithm (MSHA). A salt applies to the hashing mechanism to make it exclusive, expand its complexity and reduce user attacks like hash tables without increasing user requirements.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (11) ◽  
pp. 8-16
Author(s):  
Moses Ashawa ◽  
Innocent Ogwuche

The fast-growing nature of instant messaging applications usage on Android mobile devices brought about a proportional increase on the number of cyber-attack vectors that could be perpetrated on them. Android mobile phones store significant amount of information in the various memory partitions when Instant Messaging (IM) applications (WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook) are executed on them. As a result of the enormous crimes committed using instant messaging applications, and the amount of electronic based traces of evidence that can be retrieved from the suspect’s device where an investigation could convict or refute a person in the court of law and as such, mobile phones have become a vulnerable ground for digital evidence mining. This paper aims at using forensic tools to extract and analyse left artefacts digital evidence from IM applications on Android phones using android studio as the virtual machine. Digital forensic investigation methodology by Bill Nelson was applied during this research. Some of the key results obtained showed how digital forensic evidence such as call logs, contacts numbers, sent/retrieved messages, and images can be mined from simulated android phones when running these applications. These artefacts can be used in the court of law as evidence during cybercrime investigation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 78 (2-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Siti Zaharah Abd. Rahman ◽  
Siti Norul Huda Sheikh Abdullah ◽  
Lim Eng Hao ◽  
Mohammed Hasan Abdulameer ◽  
Nazri Ahmad Zamani ◽  
...  

This research done is to solve the problems faced by digital forensic analysts in identifying a suspect captured on their CCTV. Identifying the suspect through the CCTV video footage is a very challenging task for them as it involves tedious rounds of processes to match the facial information in the video footage to a set of suspect’s images. The biggest problem faced by digital forensic analysis is modeling 2D model extracted from CCTV video as the model does not provide enough information to carry out the identification process. Problems occur when a suspect in the video is not facing the camera, the image extracted is the side image of the suspect and it is difficult to make a matching with portrait image in the database. There are also many factors that contribute to the process of extracting facial information from a video to be difficult, such as low-quality video. Through 2D to 3D image model mapping, any partial face information that is incomplete can be matched more efficiently with 3D data by rotating it to matched position. The first methodology in this research is data collection; any data obtained through video recorder. Then, the video will be converted into an image. Images are used to develop the Active Appearance Model (the 2D face model is AAM) 2D and AAM 3D. AAM is used as an input for learning and testing process involving three classifiers, which are Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Neural Networks classifier. The experimental results show that the 3D model is more suitable for use in face recognition as the percentage of the recognition is higher compared with the 2D model.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Imam Riadi ◽  
Rusydi Umar ◽  
Muhammad Irwan Syahib

Viber is one of the most popular social media in the Instant Messenger application category that can be used to send text messages, make voice calls, send picture messages and video messages to other users. As many as 260 million people around the world have used this application. Increasing the number of viber users certainly brings positive and negative impacts, one of the negative impacts of this application is the use of digital forensic crime. This research simulates and removes digital crime evidence from the viber application on Android smartphones using the National Institute of Standards Technology (NIST) method, which is a method that has work guidelines on forensic policy and process standards to ensure each investigator follows the workflow the same so that their work is documented and the results can be accounted for. This study uses three forensic tools, MOBILedit Forensic Express, Belkasoft and Autopsy. The results in this study show that MOBILedit Forensic Express gets digital evidence with a percentage of 100% in getting accounts, contacts, pictures and videos. While proof of digital chat is only 50%. Belkasoft gets digital evidence with a percentage of 100% in getting accounts, contacts, pictures and videos. While proof of digital chat is only 50%. For Autopsy does not give the expected results in the extraction process, in other words the Autopsy application gives zero results. It can be concluded that MOBILedit Forensic Express and Belkasoft have a good performance compared to Autopsy and thus this research has been completed and succeeded in accordance with the expected goals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 381
Author(s):  
I Gusti Ngurah Guna Wicaksana ◽  
I Ketut Gede Suhartana

Abstract The development of telecommunications has increased very rapidly since the internet-based instant messaging service has spread rapidly to Indonesia. Telegram application is one of the growing and well-known application services in Indonesia, Desktop or smartphone-based Telegram applications, it is very possible to use digital crimes by using services, user personal information, or by hacking the Telegram application. This study explains the stages of investigation of cybercrime cases that occurred in desktop-based telegram. The method used for this research refers to the stage of investigation that was carried out in previous studies, namely using the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) method with the stages of the preparation stage, the collection stage, the examination stage, the analysis stage, and the reporting stage. The media used in this study is a desktop-based Telegram application that is synchronized with an Android-based Telegram. In this process, the location of the log file, cache, and digital proof image file was obtained in the conversation of a desktop-based Telegram application. Digital forensic evidence obtained is expected to strengthen evidence of criminal cases in court in the form of digital evidence analysis results. Keywords: Telecommunications, Digital Forensic, Telegram, Investigation, Cybercrime


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