Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, the wave of the cybercrime has risen rapidly. We have witnessed many major attacks on the governmental, military, financial, and media sectors. Tracking all these attacks and crimes requires a deep understanding of operating system operations, how to extract evident data from digital evidence, and the best usage of the digital forensic tools and techniques. Regardless of your level of experience in the field of information security in general, this book will fully introduce you to digital forensics. It will provide you with the knowledge needed to assemble different types of evidence effectively, and walk you through the various stages of the analysis process. We start by discussing the principles of the digital forensics process and move on to show you the approaches that are used to conduct analysis. We will then study various tools to perform live analysis, and go through different techniques to analyze volatile and non-volatile data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Practical Windows Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 4. Nonvolatile Data Acquisition

In this chapter, we will discuss the acquisition of Hard Disk Drives or HDD. Data acquisition is critical because performing analysis on the original hard drive may cause failure on the only hard drive that contains the data or you may write to that original hard drive by mistake.

So, creating a forensics image from the hard drive must be performed prior to the analysis. The acquisition of the HDD can be either conducted at the incident scene or in the analysis lab, on a live or a powered off system, and over network or locally, as we will see in this chapter.

In a nutshell, we will cover the following topics:

  • Forensic image

  • Incident response CDs

  • Live imaging of a hard drive

  • Linux for the imaging of a hard drive

  • Virtualization in data acquisition

  • Evidence integrity

  • Disk wiping in Linux