When a cyber incident happens, you want the details: what happened? How did it happen? Why did it happen? Luckily, digital forensics—a specialized field in cybersecurity that focuses on investigating cyber incidents by collecting, analyzing and preserving digital evidence—is there to answer these questions.
Whether investigating a ransomware attack, tracing the source of unauthorized access or reconstructing a chain of events after a data breach, digital forensics identify this digital evidence. However, the cost of proprietary forensic solutions can often serve as a barrier for smaller organizations, educational institutions and individual practitioners. This is where open-source tools come into play.
Built and maintained by global communities of developers and security experts, open-source forensic tools offer a powerful, cost-effective alternative to their commercial counterparts. These tools allow organizations of all sizes to perform everything from disk and memory analysis to network traffic monitoring and malware reverse engineering—without the heavy price tag.
But these open-source tools are more than just cost-saving alternatives—they’re incredibly valuable tools for digital forensics. Their source code is publicly available for auditing and moderation, allowing forensic professionals to customize tools for specific investigations. From disk imaging to memory forensics, network analysis and even cloud investigations, these tools allow cybersecurity professionals to investigate incidents effectively and efficiently. Let’s take a closer look!
Disk Forensics
Autopsy
Built by Sleuth Kit Labs, Autopsy is a GUI-based forensic platform designed for analyzing hard drives and mobile devices. Key features include file recovery from formatted or corrupted drives, timeline creation for event reconstruction and keywork searches and email parsing.
The Sleuth Kit
The Sleuth Kit is a command-line toolset and a C library for extracting data from disk drives and file system analysis. The Sleuth Kit is used behind the scenes in Autopsy as well. Some of the main characteristics include extracting and analyzing file systems (e.g., NTFS, FAT) and supporting timeline analysis with Plaso integration.
Memory Forensics
Volatility
A framework for analyzing memory dumps to uncover hidden processes, encryption keys and malware. Basic features of The Volatility Framework encompass extracting process lists, network connections and more, and identifying advanced threats like rootkits.
Redline
Redline is a comprehensive memory and file analysis tool similar to Volatility, with the development of a threat assessment profile. Memory dump analysis, Indicators of Compromise (IOC) analysis and timeline reconstruction are among the top functions of Redline.
Network Forensics
Traceeshark (Wireshark Plugin)
Traceeshark is a plugin that extends Wireshark’s capabilities for forensic investigations by integrating behavioral detection and kernel-level event analysis. Available for free on GitHub, Traceeshark’s key features include enhancing network traffic analysis with runtime security and forensic insights and allowing correlation between network and system-level events.
Zeek
A network traffic analysis framework designed for security monitoring. The main characteristics of Zeek comprise of generating detailed logs of network activity, detecting anomalies and tracing malicious activity.
Reverse Engineering and Malware Analysis
Ghidra
Ghidra, developed by the NSA’s Research Directorate, is a software reverse engineering (SRE) suite of tools. The main attraction of Ghidra is their disassembly tool, which allows a malware analyst to inspect the functionality of a malware sample without actually running it.
radare
This open-source tool is a command-line reverse engineering framework for binary analysis. Notably, radare offers hex editing, debugging and recompilation, while it is also highly customizable and scriptable.
X64dbg
An open-source Windows debugger for troubleshooting bugs and reverse engineering. X64dbg is a good option if you’re searching for an easy-to-use GUI for debugging that supports scripting and plugin-based extensions.
Cloud Forensics
Cirrus
A Python-based tool for forensic data collection in Google Cloud environments, Cirrus is recommended for simplifying evidence collection from Google Workspace and GCP, as well as automating access management and data extraction.
Scout Suite
Scout Suite is a multi-cloud security auditing tool that provides a comprehensive overview of cloud environments. Used for assessing cloud environments for forensic investigations following a breach, Scout Suite’s main capability is identifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in cloud accounts. It supports AWS, Azure, GCP and more.
