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 7. Registry Analysis

Understanding system configuration and settings and user activities is always an important step in the forensics analysis process. This configuration used to be stored in INI files, which were text files with a simple format. However, starting from Windows 3.1, the concept of registry was introduced to store the com-based components only. COM or Component Object Model was introduced by Microsoft in 1993 to enable inter-process communication and dynamic object creation in a wide range of programming languages. Since then, it has been used on a larger scale to include most of the Windows settings.

The registry can be considered as the Windows-structured database. It contains the operating system's configurations and settings, and also contains the settings of running services and installed applications along with users' preferences. It is not mandatory for the installed applications to use the registry to store its configurations and settings. Some programs use...