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

Hard drive structure


Before we start explaining the different filesystem structures, we need to illustrate the different parts in a partitioned hard drive in Windows OS. The following figure illustrates simply the structure of a whole partitioned hard drive:

Simple hard drive logical parts

Master boot record

The master boot record is the first sector (512 bytes) of the hard drive. It contains, besides the boot code, all the information about the hard drive. One of the important pieces of information that can be found in the MBR is the partition table, which contains information about the partition structure in the hard drive, and for each partition, it can tell where it starts, its size, and type.

The investigator can check the existing partition with the information in the MBR and the printed size of the hard drive for a match. If there is some missing space, the handler may assume the presence of an intended action to hide some space contains usually some related important information.

Partition...