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Digital Forensics Cookbook

Digital Forensics Cookbook

By : Cody Bounds
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Digital Forensics Cookbook

Digital Forensics Cookbook

By: Cody Bounds

Overview of this book

Modern investigations and incident response efforts live and die by digital evidence. Digital Forensics Cookbook uses realistic datasets and practical workflows drawn from real investigations to uncover the truth hidden inside computers, mobile devices, and online accounts. Rather than focusing on theory alone, this book moves you through the investigative process from triage and acquisition to artifact analysis, memory forensics, encryption challenges, malware triage, and detecting anti-forensic behavior. Along the way, you’ll perform remote artifact collection, analyze evidence across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android systems, investigate cloud-synced accounts, recover deleted data, manually carve evidence when tools fail, and identify attempts to hide or manipulate data. As you progress through the book, you’ll learn how to write and apply regular expressions and SQLite queries, build system timelines, baseline systems, automate analysis, verify findings across independent sources, generate custom password dictionaries to crack encrypted containers, detect metadata tampering designed to mislead investigators, and analyze Windows memory. By the end, you won’t just know how to run forensic tools; you’ll understand how investigators think, enabling you to turn scattered digital traces into clear, defensible conclusions.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
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1
Part 1: Triage and Evidence Acquisition
5
Part 2: Platform-Based Analysis
9
Part 3: Practical Analysis and Investigative Techniques
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Data validation

As we acquire data, we must validate it so we can prove the evidence stayed bit-for-bit identical during handling, transfer, or analysis. A cryptographic hash acts as a digital fingerprint for a file or image. Compute it immediately after acquisition, record the hash value generated, then recompute whenever the file is copied or moved to show the data is unchanged. If even one binary bit has changed, the resultant hash value will not match. This provides reproducible, mathematical proof to validate that our data has remained unaltered. Many acquisition tools (for example FTK Imager) compute hashes automatically; you can also compute them independently with other software utilities when needed.

In this recipe, we will validate acquired data by computing and comparing cryptographic hash values. You will use a hashing utility to demonstrate how identical files produce matching hashes and how even minor changes result in different values, confirming data integrity.

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Digital Forensics Cookbook
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