Incident Response and Forensics Essentials | CompTIA Security Exam Prep

In this episode of Technology Tap: CompTIA Study Guide, we dive deep into incident response, forensics, and monitoring essentials crucial for your tech exam prep. Learn the full incident response lifecycle—preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned—to develop your IT skills and master concepts important for the CompTIA exam. We discuss how having a solid plan, defined roles, and effective communication helps IT teams maintain clarity when systems fail. Tune in for real-world examples showing how SOC analysts escalate brute force attacks, how teams preserve evidence for forensics, and how incident debriefs lead to stronger security measures like multi-factor authentication. This episode is an essential part of your CompTIA study guide and technology education journey.

We then turn to digital forensics and make it concrete. Legal hold, due process, and chain of custody aren’t buzzwords—they’re the difference between actionable findings and inadmissible claims. We break down the order of volatility, memory and disk acquisition, hashing, and write blockers, plus the reporting and e‑discovery steps that transform artifacts into a defensible narrative. If you’ve ever wondered when to pull the plug or why RAM matters, this segment gives you the why and the how.

Finally, we zoom out to monitoring and the tools that power modern security operations. From Windows logs and Syslog to IDS, IPS, NetFlow, and packet capture with Wireshark, we show how each source fits the puzzle. We unpack SIEM fundamentals—log aggregation, normalization, correlation, alert tuning—and share strategies to beat alert fatigue without missing true positives. To round it out, we offer certification guidance across A+, Network+, Security+, and Tech+, helping you choose the right path whether you’re SOC-bound or supporting compliance from another business unit.

Subscribe for more practical cybersecurity breakdowns, share this with a teammate who needs a stronger IR playbook, and leave a review with your biggest monitoring or forensics question—we may feature it next time.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Host Introductions
• 1:12 Student Work Packets And Winter Break
• 3:02 Why Incident Response Matters
• 3:19 The Incident Response Lifecycle
• 3:44 Preparation And Communication Plans
• 4:45 Detection And First Responder Roles
• 5:22 Analysis, Scope, And Urgency
• 5:57 Containment To Stop The Spread
• 6:26 Eradication, Recovery, And Debriefs
• 6:39 Training, Tabletop, And Readiness
• 7:26 Digital Forensics Foundations
• 8:00 Legal Hold And Volatility Order
• 8:39 Memory And Disk Acquisition
• 9:15 Reporting, E‑Discovery, And Integrity
• 9:30 Core SOC Data Sources
• 10:00 Network Data And Packet Analysis
• 10:35 SIEM Fundamentals And Tuning
• 11:20 Monitoring Infra And SCAP Benchmarks
• 12:04 Four-Question Security Quiz
• 15:35 Exam Strategy And Cert Path Advice
• 22:40 Closing Thanks And Holiday Wishes

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:29

And welcome to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J. Rod. In this episode, we're gonna talk about incident response, digital forensic, and monitoring. Let's tap in. And welcome to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J Rod. For those who don't know me, I'm a professor of cybersecurity, and I love helping students pass the A Plus, Network Plus, Security Plus, and Tech Plus class. If you want to follow me, I'm on Instagram at Professor J Rod, on TikTok at Professor Jrod, on YouTube at TechnologyTap, and I'm on LinkedIn. Just look for Professor J Rod on LinkedIn. And you should find me there. And you can also email me at professorjrod at gmail.com. Also, I want to tell you so these last couple of episodes, I've been doing an episode and creating a student work packet. So those of you who are educators and are listening, and you know, student the winter break is coming up, and students will be home. So if you want them to maintain, you know, level of freshness for their classes, either A or Security Plus, you can go to my website, professorsjro.com slash downloads, and I put a packet for the last. This will be episode five. The last so this one and the other four before this one, I've established a student packet so that your students could work during the winter break, you know, just to keep them refreshed. You know, not a lot of work. They can listen to the podcast, and then I have a couple of assignments that they can do off the podcast. So if you want to keep them engaged over the winter recess, this is a great way for you teachers out there to keep your students engaged. So just go to professorjrod.com slash downloads and you'll see all the and just look for the episode and you'll see the work packet there that you can download it and then just hand it in when they come back to class when school begins. All right. So today we're gonna deep dive into the ones uh to one of the most critical domains in auto cybersecurity: incident response, digital forensic monitoring. This is the backbone of how modern cybersecurity teams detect, analyze, and contain and learn from attacks. The incidence response life cycle. CAPTEA gives us the classic incidence response process diagram, a life cycle every cyber professional must know. One preparation due to detection three analysis four containment five eradication, six recovery, and seven lessons learned. Let's walk through each phase with real world energy and clarity. Preparation, building the defense before the fight. Preparation includes a strong cybersecurity infrastructure, uh CIRT, a cert, a CSR, a C S I R T, and a SOC. Defined reporting and triage procedures, a communication plan, including out-of-band channels, which means like if your email got hacked, don't send out any communications anymore through email, right? Call and text, do other stuff. A list of trusted parties, clear stakeholder management, and a written incident response plan. And these are things that are really underused that most companies don't like doing because it's it's it's you know it's consuming time and money. Example Fortune 500 keeps a dedicated battle book with contacts, network diagrams, playbooks, and emergency escalation path. Through an incident, responders don't waste time searching for who to call. They act. Detection, spotting trouble early. Detection channels include log monitoring and alerting, deviation from baseline metrics, manual inspection, and whistleblowing or public reporting. Showing how analysis, click on alert, triage, and assign assignments. Definitions. First responder, the first CIRT member who takes ownership over a reported incident. An example, a stock analyst recently receives a spike in a failed SSH login attempts. They identify as brute force activity and escalate. Analysis, understanding what you're facing. Analysis includes classification, prioritization, determining impact, scope, and category, use kill chains and threat intelligence, and checking playbooks. Example, ransomware alert triggers. During analysis, the team determines two servers are encrypted, lateral movement is suspected. Detection time is 15 minutes, recovery time four hours. This determines resource allocation and urgency. 4. Containment, stopping the bleeding. Containment methods include isolate base, quarantine infected host, segmentation base, limit network spread, and preserve evidence while stopping damage. Example, a compromised laptop is isolated from the network but left to power but left powered on to preserve memory evidence. Five, eradication and recovery, returning to normal. Eradication includes removing malware, patching vulnerabilities, and reconstituting systems. Recovery includes validating systems and notifying affected stakeholders. Lesson number six, lesson learned, the debriefs. This phase includes the root cause analysis, the five whys, and full timeline walkthrough. Example A fishing attack occurred. The root cause was the lack of multi-factor authentication. Solution Rollout multi-factor authentication and update training. Seven testing and training, practicing the real thing. Cantia talks about doing tabletop exercises, walkthroughs, and red team simulations. Every great incidence response team trains like firefighters, consistently practicing for the next emergency. Digital forensic fundamentals. Digital forensics ensure evidence is collected legally, properly and verify and verifiably. Due process and legal hold. Due process ensures fairness and standard procedures. Legal hold, authority to see system as evidence and latent evidence, digital evidence not visible through tools. Example a company must preserve all employees' emails after subpoena, including deleted ones. Acquisition and order of volatility. That includes one CPU registers, two, cash, three, RAM, four, disc storage, five, logs, six, backups and archival media. Example, if you pull the plug too early, vital evidence, volatile evidence such as RAM stored malware may vanish. Memory acquisition, tools like volatility framework extract, temporary file system data, network connections, and cryptographic keys. Disk acquisition includes live acquisitions, static acquisitions, shutdown of pool plug, and use of forensic imaging tool like DCFLDD, perservation, critical items, write blocker, chain of custody, hash for integrity, right? Source reference and working copy. You want to make right and verify that nothing has changed. Report and e-discovery includes summary of findings, professional ethics, metadata extraction, and deduplication. Data sources. These are the fueling powering modern SOC operations. Core data sources, memory and file systems data, network logs, IDS IPS alerts, OS logs, application logs, endpoint security logs, dashboards, analyst dashboards, triage alerts, manager dashboards, business status, logs where the truth lives, Windows event viewer, syslog, Linux bar log shows SSH activity, and endpoint logs revealing malware quarantines. Network data sources, firewalls, IDS, IPS logs revealed malicious IPS, and attack patterns. Packet captures, tools like Warshark allow per packet analysis, reconstruction of malicious binaries, metadata, example, file timestamps, web headers, email headers, analysis, typos squatting, shown, alert monitoring, and semi-operations, semi and monitoring tools, semi security information and event management. Their key functions are log collections, sensors, remote forwarding or syslog, log aggregation, field normalization, and time synchronization. A Wazoo semi dashboard helps visualize threat patterns across thousands of endpoints. Alert and clorrelation and semis use static rules, threat intelligence, quarantine actions, executive reports, and evidence archiving, alert tuning. Definitions you must know, false positives, alert when no malicious activity, false negative, missed malicious activity, true positive, correct detection, alert fatigue, too many low value alerts overwhelm the analysis. Techniques adjust rule sensitivity, redirect flood, machine learning assisted tuning. Monitoring infrastructure includes heartbeat monitoring, SNMP traps, net flow IP fix for traffic metadata. Example, if a server stops sending heartbeats, the system may be down or compromised. Monitoring systems and applications, tools monitor system health, availability, air logs, cloud service outage, vulnerability scans, DLP alerts. Benchmark and SCAP. SCAP uses languages Oval, XCC, DF to load benchmark configs, scan systems for deviation, and identify misconfigurations. Alright. Now it's that time again. It's the five, the four. It's the four. Four questions. How does it work? I ask four Tomtias.questions. I give you the questions and then I give you the four choices. Then I read it again, and then I give you five seconds to answer the question. Hopefully we can go four for four. Question one: which phase of incidence response includes establishing an out-of-band communication channel? A detection, B preparation, C containment or D lesson learned. Again, which phases of incidence response include includes establishing an out-of-band communication channel? A detection, B preparation, C containment or D lesson learned. I'll give you five seconds to think about it. Five, four, three, two, one. The correct answer is B preparation. Out-of-band communication explicitly appears under the preparation stage, right? Where which means what? That you have to have again a different way to communicate with each other, right? You're not gonna if you the email is hacked, you're not gonna communicate via email. Two, a forensic analysis is acquiring evidence and must maintain proof that no tampering occurred. Which mechanism ensures this? A packet capture logs, B chain of custody, C Memory dump, D. Event correlation. A forensic analysis is acquiring evidence and must maintain proof that no tampering occurred. Which mechanism ensures this? A packet capture logs B chain of custody, C Memory dump or D event correlation. I'll give you five seconds. Think about it. Five, four, three, two, one. The answer is B chain of custody. Guaranteeing evidence integrity from collection to preservation. You have to store your you know, you gotta make sure it's just like you know, any cop thing, right? You want to make sure that you maintain chain of custody and you don't break chain of custody. So, for example, somebody's gambling or something or doing something they're not supposed to, right? If it's illegal, of course, the cops are gonna come and take it. But if it's like if you want to save it for purposes of like firing or lawsuit, you don't keep it under your desk, right? You're gonna put it in a room that only certain people that has a door that has a lock, that only certain people have access to. You're not just gonna leave it thrown around. That's no bueno. A SAME uh generates thousands of alerts from a misconfigured application overwhelming the SOC. Which concepts describe this situation? A false negative, B alert fatigue, C net flow overload, or D endpoint drift. I'll give you five seconds to think about it. Five, four, three, two, one, and the answer is B, alert fatigue. Right? It's too many alerts, too many like like little noises are coming in that he's just you know, he's just tired of it, and he can miss one that's actually a false negative, right? Or false positive if he keeps just being interrupted by too too many things that are alerting, right? The system you have the system set up that is too sensitive. It's you know, so he's getting overwhelmed with stuff that just like little little nuisance. Oh, this person locked in, oh, this person locked in, oh, this, you know, he doesn't wanna, you know, you don't want to be doing that, so it's a little bit too much. So all right, hopefully you're three for three. Let's go four for four. Which data source should best identify the executable transferred through SMB through a suspicious intrusion? A manager dashboard B packet capture c email metadata or d syslog. I'll read again which data source should best help identify the executable transferred through SMB during a suspected intrusion. A manager dashboard B packet capture C metadata or D syslog. I'll give you five seconds to think about it. Five, four, three, two, one. And the answer is B packet capture, right? Using Wireshark, right? You can extract malicious executable from SMB traffic. So your clue here is SMB, server message block. When you always server message block is like is an example of using server message block. You have a printer that also is a scanner, and when you scan something on that printer, on that device, you get the email, you get the scan message on your on a folder in your computer. So it's network traffic, right? What which one of these does really network traffic was not email metadata, right? It has nothing to do with network traffic. Uh syslog header, maybe. I don't know, syslog, right? You want to see the identifier, maybe manager dashboard, no. Right? So you really left with just one, which is packet capture, right? And that's the answer through Wireshark. Listen, that's this is this is how you beat the Camtia, right? You gotta read through the questions and you can pick it apart. You can pick it apart, right? You could look at the question, right? This says SMB. You think about like the example that I just gave you, right? SMB, right? Transferring something from one device to another in your network, right? So that's network, is right, and then you say, well, which one of these has anything to do with network? And it's packet capture, right? Packets that are flowing in throughout the network. And then you can that's that's how you get the answer. So is this is this test hard? Yes, this test is hard. This test is is unlike if you have the A plus and the network plus, this one is really different. I find this one to be more definition-based, right? And if you anyone who's taken this exam, passed or failed, let me know if you agree with me or disagree. But I think this one is more definition-based. This one you it's not like the other ones, right? Like the other ones have a lot of not that this doesn't have a lot of clues, but I personally I found taking this one to be more definition-based than any of the other ones. I think I and it and but I found this easier than network plus. So if I had to go through the order, it was A plus and then Security Plus, and then Network Plus. I actually found Network Plus harder than any of the other exams, other the three. And the fundamentals, there was one version and the fundamentals, they don't it doesn't have it anymore. It's been replaced by by tech plus. But one of the fundamentals exams, when they changed it, it was so like so many people were saying that it was so hard. They they just completely I don't wonder if anybody remember when they changed the fundamentals exam. Well, I think maybe 20 19, 2020, 2021, around that time, and they changed it. I remember I was working in Linkin Tech, and I didn't have to take it because I had I had one. I had fundamentals one. But the guys there who had to take it, you know, they can't, they were coming out of the exam room saying, Man, I passed, but I barely passed. They were like, Man, that thing was hard. I don't know what they did, they just changed it. I forgot what they did, but it was extremely hard. Now they have tech plus, which I kind of like. I think tech plus is really, you know, if you want to be in help desk, I don't think that's that one is for you. But if you are working like in MIS or if you're working in like marketing or if you're working in accounting and you want to know about security, IT security and compliance, right? This this one you should you should take, right? If you're gonna work in compliance in marketing or accounting or any other you know any financial, right? You might want to work in compliance. This tech plus is you should take because it teaches you the fundamentals more of security, and they incorporated a lot of AI stuff in it too. But this is this is the one for you. If you're in IT, you should not be taking if if help desk is what you want to do. I don't know if if tech plus is for you. I gotta do a little bit, this is fairly new. I gotta do a little bit of deep dive in it. Actually, when I finish, I think I'm gonna finish the security plus before the A plus. Of course, the A plus is a lot longer. I think I'm gonna I'll do while continually do the A plus. I'm gonna do the Tech Plus. So I'm gonna do a whole deep dive just after the year. This is next year. I'll I'm gonna do a whole thing on on tech plus. I think that's something that just like like if you're taking PMP, then you should take the that the next one should be your tech plus, right? You want to be a project manager on IT, you should have your tech plus certification. That way you know at least some aspect of IT. I think A plus is for help desk, and then tech plus, I don't know if they're marketing that way, but I feel like it should be for like if you have somebody in a group and and like let's say in marketing group and you have that one guy that knows a lot about computers, that guy should have a tech plus. You know, if you have a whole bunch of accounting people and one guy knows a lot about computers, he should he should have the tech plus. That's that's what it's good for. So you always want some member of your team to at least know have some competencies as far as IT is concerned. All right, that will do it for today on technology tap. I want to thank you all, and if this is the last episode that you listen for the year, I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year. And as always, keep tapping into technology. We are now part of the Pod Match Network. You can follow me at TikTok at Professor J Rod at J R O D, or you can email me at Professor J Rod J R O D at Gmail dot com.