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

Exploring program execution

Program execution artifacts indicate programs or applications that were run on the system. The user could cause the execution, or it could be an autostart/run event managed by the system. Some categories overlap with the file knowledge category we discussed earlier in the chapter. I am not going to re-examine those specific artifacts in this section. Just be aware that the artifacts from recent apps, JumpLists, an MRU, and prefetch files will also contain information about program/application activity.

Determining UserAssist

UserAssist is a registry key in the user's NTUSER.DAT file and can be found at the following path:

NTUSER.DAT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\UserAssist

The key tracks the GUI-based applications that were launched in the system. The system encodes the data in the key with ROT 13 encoding. RegRipper will decode the data automatically. The following represents the output you will see from RegRipper...