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

Windows Thumbs DB


When the user uses the Thumbnails or Filmstrip views from the Windows folder viewing options, a small thumbnail version of the pictures will be created and stored in a single file. This file is located in the same directory as the pictures in Windows XP and named Thumbs.db. The Thumbs.db file has a thumbnail version of the existing and also deleted pictures. Thumbs.db is a hidden file, and usually the user ignores it:

Figure 5: Files viewing options

If the user has deleted the pictures but hasn't delete the Thumbs.db file, it will be possible to recover the thumbnail version of the pictures deleted from that directory, which provide a good clue about the pictures' contents. Besides the thumbnail version of the picture, Thumbs.db contains the file name and the date and time of the last modification.

This Thumbs.db file is very important in cases related to pictures, such as child pornography cases.

Starting from Windows 7, the process of handling thumbnails files changed. All...