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

The NTFS filesystem


NTFS or New Technology Filesystem is the default filesystem in Windows NT as a result of the storage capacity increasing and the need for a more secure, scalable, and advanced filesystem. NTFS overcame the FAT limitations and was more suitable for high storage capacity. In NTFS, everything is a file including the filesystem area itself, as we will see in the following section.

NTFS components

Like FAT and any other filesystem, NTFS has its components as follows:

The boot sector is the first sector in the partition, and it contains some information about the filesystem itself, such as start code, sector size, cluster size in sectors, and the number of reserved sectors. The filesystem area contains many files, including the MFT or Master File Table, which contains the metadata of the files and directories in the partition. It will be discussed later.

  • The data area holds the actual contents of the files, and it is divided in clusters with a size determined during formatting...