Decoding Digital Evidence: Overcoming Challenges in Cyber Investigations

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Introduction to Cyber Investigations

Cyber investigations are a specialized field within the broader scope of investigations, dealing with digital evidence and cyber-related crimes. Most police forces, government agencies, companies, and newsrooms have dedicated cyber investigation teams. These teams are often distinct from broader OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and other investigative units, focusing specifically on the digital landscape.

Scope of Cyber Investigations

Cyber investigation teams handle a wide range of activities, including:

• Deep and Dark Web Monitoring: Tracking illicit activities and communications on hidden parts of the internet.
• Cryptocurrency Investigation: Following digital money trails to uncover financial crimes.
• Incident Response: Reacting to and managing cyber incidents to mitigate damage.
• Threat Hunting: Proactively searching for cyber threats within networks.
• Cyber Threat Intelligence: Gathering and analyzing information about potential cyber threats.

Accessibility of Cyber Investigation Capabilities

While often perceived as highly technical, cyber investigation tools and techniques are becoming more accessible. For small-scale investigations, affordable and even free data sources can be sufficient. However, this accessibility introduces the challenge of scale.

Historical data is also a challenge. Threat actors, indicators and other datapoints can often recur in cyber investigations, and knowing what appeared where and when can often be key context.

Challenges of Scale in Cyber Investigations

The scale of data involved in cyber investigations can be daunting. For example:

• The number of transactions carried out by a cryptocurrency wallet linked to a ransomware group.
• The historical IP addresses that a domain has been hosted on.
• The vast amounts of breached data that need to be analyzed.
  
  

Retrieving, visualizing, and analyzing data at this scale is a significant challenge. Effective use of APIs in tools like Falkor can help mitigate this issue by retrieving and storing large volumes of information, as well as visualizing and preparing it for qualitative and temporal analysis.

Investigating Hostile Online Infrastructure

Investigating hostile online infrastructure requires powerful, commercially available tools and data sources. These tools can make domain registration, name server, DNS information, and IP lookups structured and easier to investigate. However, running the same query across multiple sources and storing the results can be time-consuming.

Unified Systems for Efficient Investigation

A unified system that can query multiple sources simultaneously can save analysts significant time. Another challenge arises when trying to merge data from multiple, non-integrated sources. Even when sources cover the same data types, such as domain registrations, they may not be normalized, forcing analysts to spend considerable time structuring and cleaning data.

The Role of Integrated Data Sources

Having integrated data sources that communicate with each other can greatly enhance cyber investigations. This integration saves time and enables complex analysis and visualization that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

The Solution: Falkor

Falkor addresses these challenges by providing a versatile platform for cyber investigations. Key features of Falkor include:

• API Integration: Connect to any cyber investigation tool’s API.
• Data Ingestion: Ingest and analyze CSV, XML, or JSON file exports.
• Custom Data Models: Create custom data models or use pre-built ones to fuse internal data with OSINT and cyber threat intelligence datasets.
  
  

Falkor empowers cyber investigation teams to map out online infrastructure, utilize breached data sets to unmask threat actors, and search the deep and dark web, all in one integrated platform. This capability streamlines the investigative process and enhances the effectiveness of cyber investigations.