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In today’s world, cybersecurity attacks and security breaches are becoming the norm. Unfortunately, we are not immune to it, and any individual and entity is at dire risk. The best and only thing that we can do is to mitigate the risks as much as much as possible so that they do not happen at all. But even when a security breach does indeed happen, the immediate reaction is to contain it so that it does not penetrate further into the information technology/network infrastructure. From there, mission-critical processes need to be restored, until the business can resume a normal state of operations, like it was before the security breach.
But another key step here is to investigate how and why the security breach happened in the first place. The best way to do this is through what is known as “digital forensics”. This is where specially trained digital forensics investigators collect and comb through every piece of evidence to determine this. Eventually, the goal is then to use this evidence in a court of law so the cyberattacker can be made to answer for their crime and eventually be brought to justice.
“Exploitations” is when the cyberattacker actually takes advantage of that hole or gap and uses that in order to deploy a malicious payload, with the main intention to cause some sort of damage to the business entity, such as a data exfiltration attack. A good example of this is the database. This is a software application that is used quite a bit in order to house the information and data that a business makes use of on a daily basis. There are many different kinds and types of databases that are available, such as those of Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. But when the source code is created for a database application, it is often not checked for any kinds or types of vulnerabilities. Thus, the cyberattacker can exploit this and insert the malicious code.
As a precursor, this chapter and the next will actually involve the study of a database exploitation attack using a SQL Database. So in this example, if there is a gap in this particular SQL Database, the cyberattacker can easily penetrate this and launch what is known as a “SQL Injection Attack”. This is yet another concept that will also be explored in this book. This is where malicious code is actually deployed in order to alter the contents that reside in the SQL Server Database.
However, the area of digital forensics is a large one, and many topics around it can be covered. Also, generative AI is being used to not only help in the analysis of the evidence but also to help automate the digital forensics software packages that are available today. Therefore, in this book, the following is covered:
Examples of security breaches and overview of digital forensics.
How digital forensics can be used to investigate the loss or theft of data.
An introduction to the SQL Server Database.
A review of the SQL Injection Attack.
How generative AI can be used in digital forensics.
1 Security Breaches and Overview of Digital Forensics
2 Digital Forensics, Data Loss, and the SqLl Server Database
3 An Overview of The SQL Injection Attack
4 Conclusions: Using Generative AI in Digital Forensics