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

Extracting Event Logs


When event logs are analyzed, the most common approach is to export logs and then review them on the forensics workstation. There are a few reasons for such an approach. Often, we need to analyze a few event logs (for example, System, Security, and Application) from several workstations and Domain Controller. So, it is very convenient to have all event log files in one place. Also, many forensics tools not enough good work with event logs.

There are two main approaches to export event logs:

  • Live systems

  • Offline systems

Both of them have their own set of features; let's see what they are.

Live systems

While working with live systems, remember that event log files are always used, which creates some additional challenges. One way of exporting data from a live system is using Event Viewer. If you right-click on the event log file, the  Save All Events As... option will appear. Logs can be saved in various formats, including .evtx, .csv, .xml, or .txt . If you are concerned...