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

What about the data?


In this chapter so far, we've looked at the various media for storing data. Now I'd like to talk about the actual data itself, some of its states, and what happens when it's accessed.

Data states

Firstly, there's data in transit, also called data in motion. These simply describe data on the move, perhaps traversing across the network between devices or even between storage media, actively moving between locations.

Then there's data in use. Data in this state is currently being accessed by a user, or processed by a CPU. When data is accessed or used, it's pulled from the hard drive and temporarily stored in RAM, which is much faster than the hard drive (particularly mechanical drives) and stored there for as long as the user accesses it and there is power to the device.

When data is not in motion or transit, nor in use, it is described as data at rest. In this state, the data rests or resides on non-volatile media such as hard drives, optical media, flash drives, and memory...