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 6. Filesystem Analysis and Data Recovery

Although there are many automated and commercial tools available nowadays, understanding how these tools perform can distinguish one from another, and this can provide great support during expert testimony in the courtroom. Filesystem analysis and data recovery are considered as the main categories in the digital forensics process. Extracting files from a storage device or recovering deleted ones with evidential related data can solve a case.

In this chapter, we will go through two different filesystems: the FAT and the NTFS. We will basically explain how the files are structured in each one and how the recovery process of deleted files actually works. We will start with the famous TSK or The Sleuth Kit and how its command line tools are categorized, as they are based on each layer in the hard drive or the forensic image. After this, we will discuss Autopsy, the TSK graphical user interface. At the end of this chapter, we will show you Foremost...