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 RecycleBin


When a user deletes file with the normal deletion process, the file actually doesn't leave the HDD. It will be only marked as deleted on the filesystem, and all the file's metadata and contents will continue existing on the hard disk until it is overwritten by another file's metadata and content. This will allow the user to recover such a file if it was deleted by mistake, for example. The deleted files will be located in what is called a Recycle Bin in the Windows OS.

Usually, the advanced forensics tools will be able to find and view the deleted files if the system still has their metadata and can read them without carving. However, if the investigator only has the recycle bin file and needs to understand which files were deleted, this can be done by analyzing the Recycle Bin folder.

The name of the Recycle Bin differs from one version of Windows to another. In Windows versions 95 and 98, the location is under the system partition in a folder named RECYCLED. From Windows...