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)

Forensic image


Imaging of a hard drive is the process of creating an exact forensic image of the victim or the suspect hard drive in order to conduct the analysis on the imaged hard drive instead of the original one. To create an exact copy of the hard drive, there are two options that can be followed:

  • Duplication: This is where the destination of this process is the whole hard drive. In some references, this step can be addressed as cloning when the destination hard drive has the same brand, model, and size of the source hard drive. Duplication can be conducted using what are called forensic hardware duplicators. These are hardware devices, which basically have two interfaces for the source and the destination hard drives. Once they start operating, they will just copy blocks of data from the source to the destination regardless of the structure of the filesystem that is used in the source hard drive.

    Usually, hardware duplication is faster than other software tools as it operates in wire...