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

The FAT filesystem


FAT or File Allocation Table became famous with the announcement of the DOS operating system from Microsoft in 1980. After this, FAT went through many improvements trying to make it adapt with the rapidly improving technology. So, we can see FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, and exFAT. Each version overcame some of the limitations of the filesystem until the announcement of NTFS filesystem.

FAT components

FAT partition contains five main areas. They comprise the following:

  • Boot sector: This is the first sector of the partition that is loaded in memory. If this partition is the active partition, it contains information such as, but not limited to, the following:

    • Jump code: This is the location of the bootstrap and OS initialization code

    • Sector size: This is almost fixed (512 bytes)

    • Cluster size: This is in sectors (sectors/clusters)

    • Number of sectors: The total number of sectors in the partition

    • Number of root entries: This value is used with FAT12 and FAT16 only

  • FAT table: This is...