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

Live imaging of a hard drive


In case of a live system, you will need to do the following:

  • Image the volatile data, such as system memory first as discussed earlier

  • Power the system down

  • Disconnect the hard drive

  • Image the hard drive separately

However, in some situations, you will also need to image the hard drive without switching the system off. An example is in case the system is a server that is hosting a critical service that cannot be taken down, or there is an encryption present in the system, which will be reactivated if the system is powered off. This is why live acquisition is the preferred choice all the time.

FTK imager in live hard drive acquisition

In this section, we will use the FTK imager in imaging the hard drive of the live target machine. We will use the FTK image lite ( http://accessdata.com/product-download/digital-forensics/ftk-imager-lite-version-3.1.1 ), which doesn't require any installation, to leave least traces in the live system. Navigate to File | Create Disk Image...