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

Determining file knowledge

Some incidents you investigate may deal with contraband images, stolen data, or unlawful access to data. You will have to determine whether the user had knowledge of the file(s) in question, or whether the file(s) existed on the user's system. 

We will now talk about some artifacts you can find in the Windows operating system that will help you make that determination.

Exploring the thumbcache

A thumbcache is a database of thumbnail images created when the user is using Windows Explorer in a thumbnail view. Depending on the size of the thumbnail, you may have multiple databases with the same image, but with different sizes. It depends on the view the user selected while in Windows Explorer. The existence of an image found in the database is not substantial proof that the user knew the image was on the system. A thumbnail can be added to the cache without the knowledge of the user. The thumbcache can be found in the user's profile at...