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

Media analysis

There are several vectors that you can use timeline analysis on, such as network analysis, media analysis, software analysis, and hardware analysis. Network analysis is where you are analyzing log files, trace files, and the communication content between users and their devices. Media analysis is where you are analyzing physical storage devices such as hard drives, SSD drives, thumb drives, or optical storage disks. You will examine the content, allocated space, and slack space. When performing software analysis, you are reverse-engineering malicious code or analyzing the protection code for potential exports.

So, let's look at media analysis. The primary source of your digital investigation will be the forensic images of storage devices such as hard drives, SSDs, USB devices, optical disks, and mobile devices such as smartphones. Depending on your organization, you may be the person responsible for creating the forensic image, or the forensic...