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 browsers

What is a browser? It is a program or application a user can use to access websites via the World Wide Web (WWW).Which is the best browser is an ongoing debate and can be a very personal choice for a user. The user has options in which they can personalize the browser to enhance their experience when accessing the WWW. As a result, this creates many artifacts that any digital forensic investigator can use to recreate the user's activity. There will be logs, history files, and cache files that a digital forensic investigator can examine and identify unethical or criminal activity.

Like all technology, browsers are continuously being updated and changed. User experience is typically the key to the changes, but lately, security has also been a driving factor. While the security enhancements are not specifically designed to frustrate or hamper digital forensic investigations, they have that effect.

We will now discuss some common browsers you may encounter...