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)

The Sleuth Kit


Let's considers the stages of the creation of a timeline for a filesystem.

The first step for creation of the timeline is building of body file.

There are three types of data to collect:

  • Existing on filesystem files, which we could list with the dir or ls command.

  • Deleted files, which are deleted but structures of them still exist. This allows for recovering the full path and other attributes of the file. However, this depends on the filesystem, as not all filesystems allow this.

  • Unallocated inodes ($Orphan files), which are file structures which do not exist anymore.

To build a bodyfile, we will use the fls tool from TSK. The fls tool allows interacting with a forensics image as with the filesystem and extracting timeline data from the filesystem level.

This gets the value of the inode directory, processes its content, and displays the names of files in the directory (including deleted files). If the value of inode is not present, it will display the content of the root directory...