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

Summary

In this chapter, we have discussed how to locate artifacts on a Microsoft Windows-based operating system to determine the subject's culpability in the matter being investigated. You have learned about the different categories of artifacts and what actions of the user/system they represent. Using the knowledge you have gained from this chapter will allow you to quickly determine which accounts were active during the timeframe you are investigating and whether there was a removable storage device involved for the incident under investigation. You have learned about the artifacts to analyze in determining whether a user had knowledge of a specific file or application that was located on the system. We have used several commercial and open source forensic tools to access the artifacts. You now know how to find and analyze digital evidence found on a Microsoft Windows-based operating system.

The next chapter will deal with memory forensics.