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)

Windows shortcut files


The ordinary user of the Windows system can create a shortcut to any file in the system. The shortcut is like a pointer to a specific file from another location in the filesystem. The user creates this file to achieve easy access to some locations or files in the filesystem.

The Windows operating system creates shortcut files for the recently opened files by default in the following locations:

  • C:\users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent

  • C:\users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Office\Recent

Windows XP saves the shortcut files at the following location:

  • C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Recent\

Windows stores these shortcut files if the user has opened data or media files in the system. It stores the timestamps, the name and location of the original file, and the volume name.

The importance of these link files is that they won't be deleted even if the original file was deleted from the system specially in the automatically created...