Book Image

Learn Computer Forensics

By : William Oettinger
Book Image

Learn Computer Forensics

By: William Oettinger

Overview of this book

A computer forensics investigator must possess a variety of skills, including the ability to answer legal questions, gather and document evidence, and prepare for an investigation. This book will help you get up and running with using digital forensic tools and techniques to investigate cybercrimes successfully. Starting with an overview of forensics and all the open source and commercial tools needed to get the job done, you'll learn core forensic practices for searching databases and analyzing data over networks, personal devices, and web applications. You'll then learn how to acquire valuable information from different places, such as filesystems, e-mails, browser histories, and search queries, and capture data remotely. As you advance, this book will guide you through implementing forensic techniques on multiple platforms, such as Windows, Linux, and macOS, to demonstrate how to recover valuable information as evidence. Finally, you'll get to grips with presenting your findings efficiently in judicial or administrative proceedings. By the end of this book, you'll 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)
1
Section 1: Acquiring Evidence
6
Section 2: Investigation
12
Section 3: Reporting

Understanding WebMail analysis 

Web-based email has become increasingly popular as we transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. It provides ease of access, requires little to no configuration from the user, and is available from any computer. In the simplest terms, WebMail is just another internet artifact for conducting browser analysis (we will cover internet artifacts in Chapter 9, Internet Artifacts).

The service provider maintains the user's email and may provide additional services, such as address books and calendars. Users have the option of using a client to access web-based email, but I have found that those users are in the minority. When content is being hosted by the service provider, that provides additional obstacles to the digital forensic investigator. The only artifacts relating to the content may be in the user's internet history, and that may be fragmented. If a digital forensic investigator wants to access the content...