Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, the wave of the cybercrime has risen rapidly. We have witnessed many major attacks on the governmental, military, financial, and media sectors. Tracking all these attacks and crimes requires a deep understanding of operating system operations, how to extract evident data from digital evidence, and the best usage of the digital forensic tools and techniques. Regardless of your level of experience in the field of information security in general, this book will fully introduce you to digital forensics. It will provide you with the knowledge needed to assemble different types of evidence effectively, and walk you through the various stages of the analysis process. We start by discussing the principles of the digital forensics process and move on to show you the approaches that are used to conduct analysis. We will then study various tools to perform live analysis, and go through different techniques to analyze volatile and non-volatile data.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Chapter 1. The Foundations and Principles of Digital Forensics

Everything around us is changing, the way that we communicate, how we do our work, how we store or retrieve data, and even the rate of life is changing. Technology is changing everything. Crime has its share of the change because the nature of targeted valuable assets has changed, it is digital now. The normal users can now perform monetary transactions without leaving their chair, and corporations and businesses of different sizes and types usually exchange their sensitive data using their local network. So in return, instead of breaking into banks or companies, crime has also gone digital. Nowadays, your personal information, bank account details, and your corporate database are some of the targets for digital criminals.

So, how can we investigate these crimes? The investigation concepts haven't changed. This is what we will look at in this introductory chapter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What is digital crime?
  • Digital evidence
  • Digital forensics goals
  • Analysis approaches