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 (20 chapters)
Practical Windows Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Auto-run keys


Malware programs usually tend to preserve their existence in the system in case the system was rebooted or different users log on to the system. The following listing shows two important autorun keys that run when the system boots:

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ShellServiceObjectDelayLoad

These locations can host malware that targets the machine itself, such as rootkit, botnet, or backdoor. Other malware executables target some users on the system and run when the specific user or any user logs on to the system.

They can be found in the following locations:

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Runonce

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon...