Incident Response & Digital Forensics is a critical cybersecurity course designed to equip learners with the skills necessary to detect, respond to, investigate, and recover from cybersecurity incidents. The course begins with an overview of the incident response lifecycle, as defined by frameworks like NIST and SANS, covering the phases of preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. Students learn how to develop incident response playbooks, escalation procedures, and communication strategies for different types of security events, including malware outbreaks, data breaches, insider threats, phishing attacks, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats (APTs). Learners are introduced to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools such as Splunk, ELK Stack, and Microsoft Sentinel to collect, correlate, and analyze log data from network devices, servers, endpoints, and cloud services. Practical exercises teach students how to identify indicators of compromise (IOCs), analyze logs, inspect suspicious processes, and create detection rules. The course covers host-based and network-based forensics, exploring how to preserve digital evidence, generate forensic disk images, and perform memory analysis using tools like FTK Imager, Autopsy, Volatility, and Wireshark. Learners gain hands-on experience in capturing and analyzing volatile data, identifying malicious binaries, tracking lateral movement, and reconstructing attacker timelines. Students explore chain of custody documentation and legal considerations to ensure evidence is admissible in court or internal disciplinary proceedings. Real-world breach scenarios are simulated to practice incident triage, containment strategies such as isolating systems or disabling accounts, and forensic investigation techniques to determine the root cause, entry point, and impact of attacks. Emphasis is placed on coordinated response across IT, legal, PR, and executive teams, especially in high-pressure environments involving sensitive data exposure or regulatory requirements. Learners are trained to create post-incident reports, conduct retrospectives, and recommend security improvements based on findings. Advanced modules cover malware reverse engineering basics, analyzing attack tools and payloads, and threat hunting using YARA rules, MITRE ATT&CK framework, and behavior-based detection. Learners also explore cloud forensics challenges in environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, including analyzing IAM policies, storage logs, and API access patterns. The course emphasizes proactive readiness by helping organizations build IR teams, deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, run tabletop exercises, and integrate threat intelligence feeds for early warning. Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) planning is integrated to ensure minimal downtime and data loss during attacks. The importance of documenting lessons learned, refining detection rules, and updating incident response plans is reinforced throughout the course. By the end, students will have the knowledge and tools to act decisively during security incidents, preserve evidence, communicate effectively, and contribute to a culture of resilience and continuous improvement. This course is ideal for security analysts, system administrators, IT managers, and legal or compliance professionals who play a role in cybersecurity preparedness and incident management. It prepares learners to respond swiftly to threats while ensuring organizational integrity, regulatory compliance, and operational recovery.