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 USB/attached devices 

There are several security risks associated with a USB device. They are small, portable, high-capacity storage devices that can be used to exfiltrate data from an organization, or they can be used to deliver malware to an organization to compromise its security protocols. As a digital forensic investigator, you will want to know whether there were any USB devices attached to the host you are examining. We will now talk about some Windows system artifacts that will allow you to identify USB device usage on the host.

We will now look at the results for two registry keys. The first key can be found at the following path:

SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB

This registry key identifies the USB devices attached to the system, as shown in the following output:

usbdevices v.20140416 (System) Parses Enum\USB key for USB & WPD devices VID_0781&PID_5580 LastWrite: Tue Mar 27 09:22:21 2018 SN : AA010215170355310594 LastWrite: Tue Mar...