Book Image

Practical Digital Forensics

By : Richard Boddington
Book Image

Practical Digital Forensics

By: Richard Boddington

Overview of this book

Digital Forensics is a methodology which includes using various tools, techniques, and programming language. This book will get you started with digital forensics and then follow on to preparing investigation plan and preparing toolkit for investigation. In this book you will explore new and promising forensic processes and tools based on ‘disruptive technology’ that offer experienced and budding practitioners the means to regain control of their caseloads. During the course of the book, you will get to know about the technical side of digital forensics and various tools that are needed to perform digital forensics. This book will begin with giving a quick insight into the nature of digital evidence, where it is located and how it can be recovered and forensically examined to assist investigators. This book will take you through a series of chapters that look at the nature and circumstances of digital forensic examinations and explains the processes of evidence recovery and preservation from a range of digital devices, including mobile phones, and other media. This book has a range of case studies and simulations will allow you to apply the knowledge of the theory gained to real-life situations. By the end of this book you will have gained a sound insight into digital forensics and its key components.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Practical Digital Forensics
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Locating digital evidence


Locating evidence from the all-too-common large dataset requires some filtration of extraneous material, which has until recently been a mainly manual task of sorting the wheat from the chaff. But it is important to clear the clutter and noise of busy operating systems and applications, from which only a small amount of evidence really needs to be gleaned. This section describes the processes involved that practitioners follow in their endeavors to locate relevant material to assist an investigation.

Search processes

Search processes involve searching in a filesystem and inside files; common searches for files are based on:

  • Their names or patterns in their names

  • Keywords in their content

  • Temporal data (metadata), such as the last-accessed or last-written time

A pragmatic approach to the examination is necessary, where the onus is on the practitioner to create a list of keywords or search terms to cull specific, probative, and case-related information from very large groups...