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)

Summary


In this chapter, we got introduced to the registry as one of the most important Windows artifacts, which holds most of the operating system and the installed programs' configurations and settings. We explained the function of each registry hive and its location in the filesystem. Besides this, we parsed the structure of one registry file as an important process in case a corrupted registry file or a recovered fragment of the registry file needs to be analyzed. Then, we explained how malware programs use the registry to preserve their existence in the system and how to discover their presence. We used different tools to view and analyze the registry files.

In the next chapter, we will cover another important artifact of the Windows operating system, the Event Log files. We will explore how to use event files to track the activities of the users in the system and how to discover malicious activities within the system.