Book Image

Digital Forensics with Kali Linux

Book Image

Digital Forensics with Kali Linux

Overview of this book

Kali Linux is a Linux-based distribution used mainly for penetration testing and digital forensics. It has a wide range of tools to help in forensics investigations and incident response mechanisms. You will start by understanding the fundamentals of digital forensics and setting up your Kali Linux environment to perform different investigation practices. The book will delve into the realm of operating systems and the various formats for file storage, including secret hiding places unseen by the end user or even the operating system. The book will also teach you to create forensic images of data and maintain integrity using hashing tools. Next, you will also master some advanced topics such as autopsies and acquiring investigation data from the network, operating system memory, and so on. The book introduces you to powerful tools that will take your forensic abilities and investigations to a professional level, catering for all aspects of full digital forensic investigations from hashing to reporting. By the end of this book, you will have had hands-on experience in implementing all the pillars of digital forensics—acquisition, extraction, analysis, and presentation using Kali Linux tools.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
10
Revealing Evidence Using DFF

Commercial tools available in the field of digital forensics


Although this book focuses on tools within the Kali Linux operating system, it’s important to recognize the commercially-available tools available to us, many of which you can download as trial or demo versions before determining a preference.

Because this book focuses primarily on open source tools, I'll just make mention of some of the more popular commercial tools available along with their homepages.  The tools are listed only in alphabetical order and do not reflect any ratings, reviews, or the author's personal preference:

Many of the commercial tools available all allow for the following features and also offer several proprietary features, including:

  • Write blocking
  • Bit-by-bit or bit-stream copies and disk cloning/evidence cloning
  • Forensically sound evidence acquisition
  • Evidence preservation using hashes
  • File recovery (hidden and deleted)
  • Live and remote acquisition of evidence
  • RAM and swap/paging file analysis
  • Image mounting (supporting various formats)
  • Advanced data and metadata (data about data) searches and filtering
  • Bookmarking of files and sectors
  • Hash and password cracking
  • Automatic report generation

The main advantage of commercial tools is that they are usually automated and are actually a suite of tools that can almost always perform entire investigations, from start to finish, with a few clicks. Another advantage that I must mention is the support for the tools that are given with the purchase of a license. The developers of these tools also employ research and development teams to ensure constant testing and review of their current and new products.