Book Image

Practical Digital Forensics

By : Richard Boddington
Book Image

Practical Digital Forensics

By: Richard Boddington

Overview of this book

Digital Forensics is a methodology which includes using various tools, techniques, and programming language. This book will get you started with digital forensics and then follow on to preparing investigation plan and preparing toolkit for investigation. In this book you will explore new and promising forensic processes and tools based on ‘disruptive technology’ that offer experienced and budding practitioners the means to regain control of their caseloads. During the course of the book, you will get to know about the technical side of digital forensics and various tools that are needed to perform digital forensics. This book will begin with giving a quick insight into the nature of digital evidence, where it is located and how it can be recovered and forensically examined to assist investigators. This book will take you through a series of chapters that look at the nature and circumstances of digital forensic examinations and explains the processes of evidence recovery and preservation from a range of digital devices, including mobile phones, and other media. This book has a range of case studies and simulations will allow you to apply the knowledge of the theory gained to real-life situations. By the end of this book you will have gained a sound insight into digital forensics and its key components.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Practical Digital Forensics
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Apple and other operating system structures


While Microsoft dominates the household market and many network systems, other popular operation systems such as Apple and Linux are also very much in use and likely to have to be examined by the forensic practitioner. The following subsections provide a brief introduction to these systems.

Examining Apple operating systems

Apple Macintosh devices use a different operating system (currently called OS X), which, unlike Microsoft's systems, enables applications to run independently of users, who do not have direct access to the filesystem. Simplicity and convenience is the general convention, which is based on the Unix filesystem.

Applications installed on an Apple machine have limited interaction with the filesystem, being restricted from doing so from within directories inside the application's sandbox. The sandbox protects systems and users from malware attacks. In effect, it limits the access privileges of each application to tighten the security...