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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Digital Forensics Cookbook
By :
Prefetch is a Windows feature that preloads pieces of application data to speed up subsequent launches—it literally "pre-fetches" files that an application commonly uses so the program will load faster if it is launched later. Prefetch is enabled by default on client versions of Windows (it is commonly disabled or configured differently on many server versions). The metadata retained by prefetch files can help us determine when an executable was launched and how often it ran.
In this recipe, we will examine prefetch artifacts to identify program execution, frequency of use, and associated execution details.
Prefetch files have a .pf file extension and are stored in the following location:
{root}\Windows\Prefetch
Export all files from these directories within the Microsoft Windows dataset and place them in a working folder on your workstation for analysis.
Also, you will need to download and extract VSCMount from Eric Zimmerman's website: