Book Image

Digital Forensics with Kali Linux

Book Image

Digital Forensics with Kali Linux

Overview of this book

Kali Linux is a Linux-based distribution used mainly for penetration testing and digital forensics. It has a wide range of tools to help in forensics investigations and incident response mechanisms. You will start by understanding the fundamentals of digital forensics and setting up your Kali Linux environment to perform different investigation practices. The book will delve into the realm of operating systems and the various formats for file storage, including secret hiding places unseen by the end user or even the operating system. The book will also teach you to create forensic images of data and maintain integrity using hashing tools. Next, you will also master some advanced topics such as autopsies and acquiring investigation data from the network, operating system memory, and so on. The book introduces you to powerful tools that will take your forensic abilities and investigations to a professional level, catering for all aspects of full digital forensic investigations from hashing to reporting. By the end of this book, you will have had hands-on experience in implementing all the pillars of digital forensics—acquisition, extraction, analysis, and presentation using Kali Linux tools.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
10
Revealing Evidence Using DFF

Chapter 6. File Recovery and Data Carving with Foremost, Scalpel, and Bulk Extractor

Now that we’ve learned how to create forensic images of evidence, let’s take a look at the file recovery and data carving process using Foremost, Scalpel, and Bulk Extractor.

When we last covered filesystems, we saw that various operating systems use their own filesystems to be able to store, access, and modify data. So too, storage media use filesystems to do the very same.

Metadata, or data about data, helps the operating system identify the data. Metadata includes technical information, such as the creation and modification dates, and the file type of the data. This data makes it much easier to locate and index files.

File carving retrieves data and files from unallocated space using specific characteristics such as file structure and file headers, instead of traditional metadata created by, or associated with, filesystems.

As the name implies, unallocated space is an area of storage media that has been marked...