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

Using Scalpel for data carving


Scalpel was created as an improvement of a much earlier version of Foremost. Scalpel aims to address the high CPU and RAM usage issues of Foremost when carving data.

Specifying file types in Scalpel

Unlike Foremost, file types of interest must be specified by the investigator in the Scalpel configuration file. This file is called scalpel.confand is located at etc/scapel/:

To specify the file types, the investigator must remove the comments at the start of the line containing the file type as all supported file types are commented out with a hashtag at the beginning of the file type. The following screenshot shows the default Scalpel configuration file (scalpel.conf) with all file types commented out. Notice that each line begins with a hashtag:

We've removed the hash tags at the beginning of some of the lines to let Scalpel know to search for these specific file types, this also reduces the time taken to otherwise search for all supported file types. The following...