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

Capturing RAM

When the decision is made to capture the RAM from the system, several factors need to be considered before moving forward. The most significant issue is that you will be changing the state of the system when you collect the volatile data.

The Scientific Workgroup on Digital Evidence (SWGDE) has explored the collection of volatile data and offers the following considerations:

  • The application used to collect the data in memory will overwrite some contents of the memory.
  • The larger the tool and associated files are, the more data it overwrites.
  • The system may load the USB device driver into memory.
  • The system may load the USB device driver into the registry.
  • The application that's used to collect the data in memory will show up in some Most Recently Used (MRUs).

There is the potential that the collection of RAM may cause a system lockup or instability in the system. The digital forensic investigator must be aware of how the tool being...