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

Virtualization in data acquisition


Virtualization offers great benefits to digital forensics science. In virtualization, everything is a file, including the guest memory and the guest hard drive. What the handler needs to do is to identify the right file of the source that they need to acquire and copy this file to the external storage.

The snapshot concept that can be found in most of the virtualization programs offers the investigator more images of the machine at different times. This can, if acquired and analyzed, view the timeline behavior of the machine, that is, before and after the malware infection:

Windows memory files in the virtual machine

In the previous image, we can see the vmem files of the VMware program. VMware is one of the virtualization programs. This image contains the current memory file and two vmem files for two snapshots taken on two different dates. The size of the files are all the same because this is like the memory dump process, it copies the entire machine's...