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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Digital Forensics Cookbook
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Investigators often rely heavily on evidence recovered from disk. However, some of the most important artifacts never exist there at all. Instead, they exist only temporarily within memory while the system is running.
In Chapter 3, we performed an acquisition of random access memory (RAM) from our own workstation. RAM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when a system powers down, which is why, unlike other acquisitions, RAM must be captured on scene during evidence collection rather than later in the lab. While this makes it more challenging to preserve and analyze, it can also make memory one of the most valuable evidence sources available.
In simple terms, the purpose of RAM is to speed up system processing. When a user opens a file from disk, the operating system loads the data into RAM, which can be accessed much faster than disk storage. The central processing unit (CPU) then reads and processes that data directly from memory as the system and user interact...