Book Image

Computer Forensics with FTK

By : Fernando Carbone
Book Image

Computer Forensics with FTK

By: Fernando Carbone

Overview of this book

<p>With the increase of electronic crimes and the need to constantly audit the proper use of resources, companies need qualified professionals and appropriate tools to carry out these activities. The FTK platform, with the ability to collect and analyze digital evidence quickly and with integrity, is a great solution to help professionals achieve these goals. It is extremely useful for conducting digital investigations, helping you conduct a thorough investigation through a single tool and ensure the integrity of evidence. It is hard to find technical information on this tool and that’s where this book will come in handy, helping professionals perform their activities with greater excellence.</p> <p>This tutorial leads by example, providing you with everything you need to use FTK and the tools included such as FTK Imager, Registry View, and PRTK in order to enhance your Computer Forensics knowledge in an easier and more efficient way.</p> <p>You will be introduced to the background of Computer Forensics, which include the types of digital devices that can be acquired and how to prepare for a new case of investigation. You will become acquainted with the FTK architecture and learn how to leverage its features in order to help you find the evidence as fast as possible. Through this book, you will also learn the memory forensics technique using the memory dump feature of FTK Imager. Furthermore, you will learn how to extract some important information such as process and DLL information, Sockets, and Driver List Open Handles.</p> <p>To conclude your tutorial, you will learn how to extract information from Windows Registry and how to recover passwords from the system and files. You will find this book an invaluable supplement to teach you all the steps required for the completion of investigations on digital media and to generate consistent and irrefutable evidence in court.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Computer Forensics with FTK
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.packtpub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Computer Forensics Using FTK
Index

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Computer Forensics Using FTK

Forensic Toolkit (FTK) is a complete platform for digital investigations, developed to assist the work of professionals working in the information security, technology, and law enforcement sectors.

Through innovative technologies used in filters and the indexing engine, the relevant evidence of investigation cases can be quickly accessed, dramatically reducing the time to perform the analysis.

This chapter will cover the first steps needed to install and configure the FTK tool.

Forensic digital investigations include the following processes:

  • Preparation

  • Acquisition and preservation

  • Analysis

  • Reports and presentation

This process will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, Working with FTK Forensics, with the use of FTK forensics and enterprise editions.

The computer forensics tools need to be kept updated to address issues such as an increasing size of hard drives and the use of encryption in order to reduce the time to perform the data acquisition and analysis.

AccessData has two versions of the platform:

  • FTK forensics: This version of FTK, which will be covered in this book, has the ability to perform the acquisition and analysis of digital devices such as computer hard drives, USB drives, flash memory devices, smartphones, tablets, and other digital media. Its approach is related to a process called post-mortem computer forensics, which happens when the computer has been powered down.

  • AD Enterprise: In general, AD Enterprise has the same features as the FTK forensics version plus the ability to analyze multiple computers across your company simultaneously. Another important feature of this version is the ability to acquire and analyze volatile data, such as RAM. The investigation process is totally confidential, and the investigated user will not be aware of the analysis, even if it is done through the network and with the target equipment in use.

    Note

    In this book, we will use the solution only in the standalone version.