deepthi sWhat if your company was breached 197 days ago, and you are still clueless about it?
As per research, it takes an average of 197 days to identify a cyber intrusion and 64 days to contain it, meaning that an attacker has been in your systems for almost 10 months. The damage can be massive from stealing sensitive information, planting backdoors, and installing malware.
The frequency of cyberattacks is increasing year after year. Currently, there is one cyberattack every 39 seconds. Threat actors have begun using AI-driven ransomware, making it difficult to predict what will happen by 2026. It’s not a surprise anymore that the average cost of a data breach has gone up to $4.88 million.
Now the real question is how prepared you are to address these attacks when they happen.
Without a clear and well-defined forensic response process, businesses risk losing evidence, delaying recovery, facing legal loss, and falling victim to repeat attacks.
In this blog, you will learn about the different phases of cyber forensics and how to best prepare your organisation for a digital forensic investigation.
Why Businesses Choose Mitigata for DFIR Services?
With 800+ happy clients and experience across 25+ industries, we offer Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) services to help you recover fast and build long-term cyber resilience.
One Breach Can Cripple You. One Team Can Save You.
Here’s what we offer:
24/7 Incident Response: We stay available around the clock to ensure your operations keep running.
Integrated Response Team: Cyber forensics experts, legal consultants, and crisis managers collaborate to lead technical and executive responses.
Insurance-Ready Forensics: We deliver reports and evidence that insurers and regulators can rely on.
Precision in Each Phase: From evidence preservation to thorough forensic analysis, threat actor profiling, and breach impact assessment, we cover every important aspect.
What really happens inside a Security Operations Center? The answer might surprise you!
What Is Digital Forensics and Incident Response?
Digital forensics is the practice of capturing, preserving, and analysing digital evidence so you can reconstruct events and prove what happened. Incident response is the operational side of it. The process outlines the actions you take to identify, contain, remove and recover from a breach.
In short, DFIR acts as your company’s Sherlock Holmes for anything related to a cybercrime that occurs.
The following is a ransomware example that shows how DFIR works:
The incident response team promptly isolates the impacted systems to prevent further encryption.
Meanwhile, digital forensic experts create forensic photos of corrupted systems before any cleanup to preserve evidence. They also examine memory dumps to figure out what variant of ransomware compromised your systems and what the ransomware did with the machines for forensic purposes.
According to the log analysis, it came out that the attacker got access three weeks ago using phished employee credentials.
In addition, the forensic assessment revealed that the attacker spent those weeks mapping the network, stealing sensitive data, and preparing for the ransomware deployment.
The DFIR Partner You Call When Minutes Matter
What are the steps in the digital forensic process?
Here’s a practical breakdown of the digital forensics investigation process, explained step-by-step:
- Preparation: Build Your Defence Before the Attack
The first step of a cyber forensic investigation process is preparation, and the best time to prepare for an incident is before it happens.You should have forensic tools ready, contact information of your DFIR team, legal counsel, and insurance providers documented, and baseline security configurations in place.
- Detection & Triage
The next step of the digital investigation process is the detection of a suspicious activity. This involves determining whether a security event is actually an incident requiring response.Detection often starts with an alert when your Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) system flags suspicious behaviour, or a user reports that files have suddenly become encrypted. The key is separating false positives from real threats quickly.
- Containment
Once an incident has been identified, containment minimises more damage. This can occur in both short- and long-term periods. Short-term containment may involve unplugging infected systems from the network or disabling hacked accounts.Long-term containment entails deploying temporary fixes such as firewall rules or segmentation to halt the spread while keeping corporate activities running.
- Evidence Collection
The fourth step in the digital forensic process is where forensic experts capture system images, memory dumps, log files, and network data to help reconstruct what happened.Every action must be logged and timestamped. The “chain of custody” ensures that the evidence can stand up in court or during insurance claims.
What’s your cyber risk worth? See how cyber risk is quantified and managed.
- Forensic Analysis
The next cyber forensics step is where the investigation truly begins. Analysts dig into the captured evidence to determine:
- How the attacker got in (phishing email, unpatched vulnerability, weak credentials).
- What they did once inside (moved laterally, installed malware, exfiltrated data).
- What systems and data were affected?
- Eradication
Once the source is known, it’s time to eliminate it. Eliminating it may mean deleting malware, resetting credentials, patching vulnerabilities, and reviewing configurations.If you skip this step, there is a chance that you will be breached again. For example, numerous healthcare organisations have been hit by the same attackers multiple times because they did not remove the same methods (like scheduled tasks or hidden admin accounts).
- Post-Incident Activities
The final stage of a digital forensic investigation is a thorough post-incident review meeting with all stakeholders. Document what you learned: what was good and what was not so good during your response.This is then used as a basis to update your incident response plan. Update your incident response plan based on this and implement additional security controls to avoid such events.
Stop Paying the Price of Poor Incident Response
How to Prepare Your Organisation for a Digital Forensic Investigation
If you know all the phases of digital forensics, you should also know how to get your organisation ready for a digital forensics investigation before an attack strikes:
| Step | What to Do | Why It Matters |
| 1 | Keep your incident response plan updated | A current plan helps your team act fast and smart. |
| 2 | Centralise and secure your logs | Reliable logs are key to tracing breaches. |
| 3 | Set up EDR and network monitoring | Catch threats early, before they spread. |
| 4 | Run quarterly phishing drills | Sharpens employee awareness and response. |
| 5 | Pre-approve forensic and legal contacts | Cuts downtime when every minute counts. |
| 6 | Regularly test and store offline/immutable backups | Ensures clean recovery if systems go down. |
| 7 | Sync all system clocks to a trusted time source | Accurate timestamps are critical in investigations. |
Is outsourcing your cybersecurity a smart move or a silent risk? Find out now.
Conclusion
Proper incident response and forensic analysis limit damage, preserve evidence, and get you back to business faster.
Whether you need to build an incident response strategy or need immediate breach support, Mitigata provides exclusive DFIR services at competitive prices.
Book a brief call with our experts today & make your business cyber-resilient!
akshit k