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 the NTFS filesystem

The New Technology File System (NTFS) is the default filesystem for Microsoft Windows operating systems. FAT32 had some significant shortcomings, which required a filesystem that was more reliable and efficient, along with additional administrative improvements to help Microsoft remain viable in the corporate environment. They initially designed NTFS for the server environment; however, as the hard drive capacity has increased, it is now the default filesystem in the commercial and consumer market for the Windows operating system.

NTFS is far more complicated than the FAT filesystem; however, the overall purpose remains the same:

  • To record the metadata of a file, that is, the filename, the date timestamps, and the file size
  • To mark the clusters the file occupies
  • To record which clusters are allocated and which clusters are unallocated

The NTFS filesystem comprises the following system files:

Figure...