What are artifacts in an incident investigation?

In the context of an incident investigation, artifacts specifically refer to pieces of evidence collected during the investigation process. This includes various forms of data that help analysts understand what happened during an incident and how to mitigate similar issues in the future. Log files and system snapshots are critical because they provide information about system activity and state at particular times, which allows investigators to reconstruct events and potentially identify vulnerabilities or malicious actions.

Log files document actions taken on a system, such as user logins, file access, or system errors, while system snapshots capture the state of a system at a specific point in time, preserving information about running processes, file states, memory contents, and configurations. Together, these artifacts are invaluable for analyzing security breaches, understanding the methods employed by intruders, and developing a response strategy.

The other choices present misleading definitions of artifacts. Visual representations of network maps, while useful for understanding network architecture, do not serve as evidence of an incident. Hardware components may be related to the incident but are not the primary artifacts collected during an investigation. Training manuals, while critical for operational security, do not act as direct evidence of incident-related activities.