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

Chapter 5: Computer Investigation Process

Being a digital forensic examiner requires you to have a plan to conduct the investigation. For instance, there is the kitchen sink approach – where the person requesting the examination states, I want it all. However, this is not practical when the smallest drive from a system might contain hundreds of thousands of pages or events. While the kitchen sink approach is a plan, it may not be the most efficient.

In reality, your search method will depend on the crime you are investigating, and whether there are limitations to the scope of the search. In some investigations, the judicial authority may restrict an investigator's access to digital evidence to only email messages, or you may be limited to a specific date and time within the forensic image.

In this chapter, we will first go through timeline analysis, where a user's activity is analyzed temporally. Then, we will examine the storage containers that are used...