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

Data volatility


In this section, we take a look at why data is lost when power to the volatile memory is lost.

Data can exist as long as the media it is stored on is capable of storing the data. Hard drives (mechanical and solid-state), flash drives, and memory cards are all non-volatile storage media. Although SSDs have and continue to make drastic improvements in data access times, RAM thus far remains the faster type of memory, typically referred to only as memory, inside devices.

RAM, however, is volatile memory. Unlike non-volatile memory found in hard drives and flash drives, data stored in RAM is kept there temporarily, only for as long as there is an electrical current being provided to the chips. There are two types of RAM that we need to be aware of: Static RAM (SRAM) and Dynamic RAM (DRAM).

SRAM is superior to DRAM, but is far more costly than DRAM because of the extensive materials used in building the chips. SRAM is also physically much larger than DRAM. SRAM can be found in the...