What is digital forensics and incident response (DFIR)?
Digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) is the practice of identifying, investigating, and responding to cyberattacks. It combines two key areas:
Digital forensics: Preserves and analyzes evidence (logs, images, memory, artifacts) to reconstruct the attack and attribute responsibility
Incident response: Isolates affected assets, evicts the adversary, and restores services with fixes to prevent recurrence
Overall, DFIR correlates identity activity (e.g., IAM logins), control-plane events (such as AWS CloudTrail), and workload signals (like process creation or network flows) to trace attacker behavior. Analysts piece these digital artifacts together to uncover root causes, map lateral movement, and prevent similar cybersecurity incidents in the future.
How to Prepare for a Cloud Cyberattack: An Actionable Incident Response Plan Template
A quickstart guide to creating a robust incident response plan - designed specifically for companies with cloud-based deployments.
How DFIR has evolved into a security cornerstone
DFIR has shifted from analyzing hard drives and on-prem networks to tackling cloud-native threats. Threat actors now chain together misconfigurations, exposed credentials, and legitimate cloud services to move laterally across environments.
Wiz’s 2024 Cloud Attack Retrospective found that many top threats stemmed from preventable issues such as public-facing misconfigurations, leaked secrets, and identity abuse. For example, a third of PostgreSQL environments have publicly exposed instances that put them at risk.
To counter such issues, modern DFIR combines forensics and incident response, supported by automated security tools for evidence capture, attack path analysis, and threat detection. Incident response frameworks like the Cyber Kill Chain and MITRE ATT&CK further structure investigations to help counter cyberattacks.
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What are the steps in the DFIR process?
The DFIR process includes 10 steps that guide security teams in investigating, containing, and recovering from digital incidents. Following these steps can help you handle security breaches methodically while preserving evidence for accurate analysis and reporting.
What are the 4 steps in the digital forensics process?
The DFIR process typically involves four stages, beginning with digital forensics.
1. Data collection
Objective: Preserve digital evidence across systems to enable accurate investigation.
Process: Collect logs, storage media, and network traffic to reconstruct events. In cloud environments, this includes IAM activity, workload snapshots, and API call histories. Tools like FTK Imager, Wireshark, and Splunk help capture this information without altering the source.
Always work from forensic copies. Analyzing live data risks altering or destroying fragile evidence, especially in ephemeral workloads.
2. Examination
Objective: Detect anomalies and indicators of compromise hidden in raw data.
Process: Review event logs, registry files, memory dumps, and transaction data for suspicious activity. Forensic platforms such as EnCase and FTK help filter noise, while threat intel feeds provide context on known exploits. In the cloud, correlating IAM activity with unusual logins can reveal compromised accounts.
Use YARA rules and custom signatures to flag known malware families or unusual behavior patterns quickly.
3. Analysis
Objective: Reconstruct the attacker’s timeline and methods.
Process: Correlate logs, registry files, and memory artifacts to map how the incident unfolded—from initial access to lateral movement. Combine automated tools for parsing with manual review to validate findings. In cloud-native contexts, attack path mapping and blast radius analysis expose how misconfigurations or identity misuse enabled movement across services.
Don’t focus only on the entry point. Overlooking downstream impact can miss hidden persistence or broader compromise.
4. Reporting
Objective: Communicate findings clearly to stakeholders and ensure evidence integrity.
Process: Build reports with an executive summary, detailed timeline of events, evidence-backed conclusions, and remediation recommendations. Use charts or diagrams to make complex data accessible. Immutable logs and automated audit trails are critical for ensuring findings hold up under compliance or legal review.
Write reports in plain language. Decision-makers need clarity on what happened, the impact, and the path forward—not just technical jargon.
Need a starting point for building or refining your incident response plan? Check out our roundup of free incident response plan templates. These practical, cloud-ready examples provide a framework for developing your own approach.
Adapting proven templates instead of starting from scratch can help your team move faster while ensuring critical steps—like role assignments, escalation paths, and recovery actions—are already accounted for.
What are the 6 steps of the incident response process?
After digital forensics comes incident response steps. Here’s what they entail.
1. Preparation
Objective: Build readiness for inevitable security incidents.
Process: Define clear roles and responsibilities, develop policies, and train incident response teams through regular tabletop exercises. In cloud-native environments, maintain playbooks for common scenarios like leaked credentials or ransomware in cloud storage. Platforms like Wiz can automate runbooks, enforcing responses at scale.
Treat preparation as a living process. Update playbooks and training regularly to reflect the latest threats and cloud-specific risks.
2. Detection and analysis
Objective: Quickly spot and validate suspicious activity before it escalates.
Process: Use Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, CDR platforms, and threat intelligence feeds to monitor logs, user behavior, and network traffic for anomalies. Machine learning and AI analytics can accelerate detection. In cloud environments, focus on IAM activity, API calls, and workload telemetry—for example, unexpected cross-region transfers or privilege escalations.
Don’t ignore weak signals. Seemingly minor anomalies often reveal broader compromise when correlated.
3. Containment
Objective: Limit the blast radius and stop attackers from spreading further.
Process: Isolate compromised accounts, workloads, or systems immediately using native cloud controls like security groups, firewalls, and access revocations. Apply predefined playbooks to suspend affected services or accounts. Automating evidence capture during containment helps preserve data for forensics.
Containment buys time—it’s not eradication. Always capture evidence before taking assets offline.
4. Eradication
Objective: Eliminate the root cause and ensure attackers cannot re-enter.
Process: Remove malicious files, revoke compromised credentials, disable persistence mechanisms (e.g., unauthorized API keys), and apply patches or configuration fixes. Vulnerability scanners and malware removal tools can support this process. In cloud systems, ensure that IAM roles and permissions are fully remediated.
Eradication without proper validation can leave backdoors behind. Always verify system integrity before moving on.
5. Recovery
Objective: Safely restore normal operations while strengthening defenses.
Process: Redeploy workloads from clean images, patch vulnerabilities, and re-establish services with least-privilege access in place. Enhance monitoring and segmentation to reduce the chance of repeat compromise. In cloud-native systems, confirm that container registries and serverless deployments are uncompromised.
Track recovery metrics such as mean time to recover (MTTR) to measure ongoing improvements.
6. Post-incident review
Objective: Capture lessons learned and strengthen the security posture.
Process: Document the incident timeline, response actions, and areas for improvement. Feed findings into playbooks, detection rules, and training programs. In cloud environments, include details like which identities were abused and whether automated defenses worked as intended.
Skipping the review step wastes valuable insights. Every incident should refine both technology and team readiness.
The benefits of DFIR
You can reap multiple benefits when implementing DFIR. Here are the top five:
Prevention of issue recurrence: By acting as an informative feedback loop, DFIR reduces the odds of future security incidents. It also enables your team to proactively strengthen its security posture by identifying and remediating root causes.
Evidence integrity and legal readiness: A thorough DFIR process safeguards digital evidence and provides detailed security event records. This ensures investigators can reconstruct incidents, prosecutors can pursue cybercriminals, and your organization can remain compliant with regulations.
Rapid and resilient recovery: Effective response efforts minimize downtime and accelerate recovery, reducing both business disruption and the financial impact of breaches.
Improved compliance and reporting: DFIR supports regulatory requirements with comprehensive incident reports that showcase thorough investigations, accurate evidence gathering, and clear communication of findings.
Enhancement of cloud-native advantages: Cloud-native DFIR leverages ephemeral workload capture, automated evidence collection, and scalable forensic workflows for dynamic cloud environments. This approach enables faster investigations, a secure chain of custody, and seamless integration with cloud infrastructure.
While the benefits are significant, it's also important to be aware of common DFIR challenges you may encounter.
What are the main challenges of DFIR?
DFIR teams face several challenges when responding to cyber incidents. Here are just a few of them:
Preserving fragile evidence across environments: It’s often a struggle to capture volatile data before it changes or disappears, especially in cloud environments where workloads are transient. You must also maintain an unbroken chain of custody to ensure evidence integrity for law enforcement investigations and potential legal proceedings.
Managing scale and complexity: IT environments are often vast and complex, requiring your team to have specialized tools and expertise to efficiently handle diverse systems, massive data volumes, and dynamic cyber threats.
Responding quickly to evolving threats: Attack techniques and vulnerabilities constantly change, so incident responders must act quickly to minimize damage, preserve critical evidence, and adapt to new risks.
Addressing these challenges requires constant vigilance and swift action. Specialized tools are also invaluable for mitigating threats effectively, provided your team selects solutions tailored to your organization’s needs.
Types of DFIR tools
DFIR’s effectiveness largely depends on the tools you use during the incident response process. There are several types that help with different aspects of DFIR:
Forensic analysis platforms: These tools allow DFIR professionals to extract, preserve, and analyze forensic data from various sources during investigations.
SIEM solutions: SIEM platforms aggregate and correlate security event data and offer real-time monitoring and alerting to help organizations respond to incidents swiftly.
CDR tools: CDR solutions enhance cloud-based DFIR capabilities by identifying and investigating suspicious activity within cloud environments, which reduces security risks.
Malware analysis tools: These tools help teams identify, contain, and resolve malware-related incidents to ensure effective incident recovery.
Specialized technologies like these are essential for supporting cybersecurity elements like threat intelligence, forensic investigation, and security monitoring.
Wiz's approach to DFIR in the cloud
Wiz offers powerful capabilities to support DFIR in cloud environments, helping your organization respond effectively to cloud security incidents. It does this using end-to-end cloud forensics tools, runtime sensors, and robust CDR capabilities alongside:
Automated evidence collection: Your team can copy potentially compromised cloud workloads into a dedicated forensic account and download investigation packages—including logs and artifacts—in minutes instead of hours or days.
Chain-of-custody automation: Immutable logs and audit trails preserve evidence integrity from collection through presentation, ensuring legal defensibility and compliance with industry standards.
Accelerated root-cause and blast-radius analysis: Wiz’s Security Graph uncovers vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and lateral movement paths to help your team pinpoint an incident’s cause and assess its potential spread quickly.
Integrated response workflows: Post-incident risk scoring and built-in remediation guidance help you prioritize fixes, streamline collaboration, and reduce future risk.
By automating investigations and integrating response workflows, Wiz reduces the time, cost, and complexity of DFIR in the cloud for your security team.
For a closer look at how Wiz enables DFIR workflows, sign up for a guided demo. Also, if you need to create an IR plan from scratch or improve an existing one, you can download our Cloud Incident Response Plan Template today to get started.
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