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

Random access memory?

RAM is used to temporarily store working data/code on an active computer system. Unlike on traditional storage devices, that is, a hard drive, data can be read/written on RAM at extremely fast speeds. Current technology allows the RAM chips to be created around an integrated circuit chip with metal oxide semiconductor cells. The data stored within the RAM chips is considered to be volatile. We lose volatile data when the computer system is no longer powered on. This is a significant reason the pull the plug tactic when responding to a scene involving activated computer systems is no longer recommended.

You may run into two different types of RAM: static RAM (SRAM) and dynamic RAM (DRAM). SRAM is considered faster and more efficient with respect to energy use, whereas DRAM is cheaper to produce than SRAM. You will typically find SRAM being used as cache memory for the CPU, and DRAM chips being used for memory chips for the computer system.

The following...