A surge in cyber incidents and heightened regulatory scrutiny have increased the demand for digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) teams. Many enterprises recruit DFIR professionals to investigate financial crimes, uncover insider threats, monitor policy violations, investigate human resource complaints, and respond to cyber incidents. At the same time, however, awareness of and inclination to invest in state-of-the-art tools and technologies to enable a smooth DFIR process remain low. DFIR teams rely on multiple open-source tools to retrieve digital evidence, conduct root cause analysis, and generate incident reports. This can be time-consuming, inefficient, and introduce human error; professionals in this industry commonly report burnout. In this study, Frost & Sullivan delves deeply into three emerging approaches—automation, outsourcing, and blockchain forensics—to help DFIR analysts, including the challenges the approach tries to solve, the features and benefits of using the approach, and vendor highlights and feature comparisons of available products.

Author: Swetha Ramachandran Krishnamoorthi