The Incident Response Lifecycle (NIST SP 800-61): Orchestrating incident management through a standardized lifecycle: Preparation, Detection/Analysis, Containment/Eradication, Recovery, and Post-Incident Activity (Lessons Learned).
Live Incident Triage & Containment: Assessing active systems under compromise, preserving highly volatile digital artifacts, isolating endpoints from adjacent subnets, and executing automated containment scripts.
Memory Forensics (Volatility): Acquiring and analyzing volatile system RAM to discover running processes, detect injected code, trace open network connections, and unmask resident malware or rootkits.
Disk Forensics (dd, FTK Imager, Autopsy): Acquiring bit-stream images of non-volatile storage drives, reconstructing deleted data, mapping chronological file system timelines, and parsing partition details.
Network Forensics (Wireshark, PCAPs): Capturing and parsing network packet captures (PCAPs), carving binary objects out of raw network streams, and decrypting traffic to analyze external command-and-control operations.
Chain of Custody & Forensic Legal Standards: Documenting the handling, transit, and storage of physical and digital evidence, calculating secure cryptographic hashes of drives, and preparing verified data for legal proceedings or expert testimony.
Government IR Mandates & Timeframes: Navigating regulatory reporting requirements, establishing escalation chains of command, and adhering to strict legal reporting windows mandated by agencies such as CISA and state entities (DHSES).