Book Image

Learn Computer Forensics – 2nd edition - Second Edition

By : William Oettinger
Book Image

Learn Computer Forensics – 2nd edition - Second Edition

By: William Oettinger

Overview of this book

Computer Forensics, being a broad topic, involves a variety of skills which will involve seizing electronic evidence, acquiring data from electronic evidence, data analysis, and finally developing a forensic report. This book will help you to build up the skills you need to work in a highly technical environment. This book's ideal goal is to get you up and running with forensics tools and techniques to successfully investigate crime and corporate misconduct. You will discover ways to collect personal information about an individual from online sources. You will also learn how criminal investigations are performed online while preserving data such as e-mails, images, and videos that may be important to a case. You will further explore networking and understand Network Topologies, IP Addressing, and Network Devices. Finally, you will how to write a proper forensic report, the most exciting portion of the forensic exam process. By the end of this book, you will have developed a clear understanding of how to acquire, analyze, and present digital evidence, like a proficient computer forensics investigator.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
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16
Index

Determining account usage

Identifying the user behind the keyboard is one of the hardest things you must do when conducting a digital forensic examination. You will have to parse through many artifacts to help make that determination. First, you will want to gather as much information about the user account in question and see whether you can relate it to the physical person. You will want to gain as much information about that user account and its activity related to the matter you are investigating. We will now go over some artifacts from a Windows-based operating system that will help you determine and identify that account activity starting with the user’s last login or password change.

Last login/last password change

The following path will contain information about the user accounts on the system:

C:\windows\system32\config\SAM\Domains\Account\Users

To navigate to the location that contains the user account information, I will use Eric Zimmerman’...