Hacking Exposed Computer Forensics Blog

One of the advantages of running a computer forensic company is that I get to buy lots of tools to use. When I was working for other companies I would have to wait for budget cycles and submit justification for tool purchases, but for the last 7 years I’ve been able to buy them as I needed them. In those 7 years we’ve accumulated a lot of tools that we use for different specializations and a body of knowledge related to them that I feel could be better utilized to share with all of you.



With that in mind I think it would be interesting to see how all these tools compare when working on the same forensic image. So with that in mind I’m going to start making some test images to see how data is interpreted from the same disk but in different image formats. I am going to start with the identification, not recovery, of deleted files and go from there.



My initial tool list to test includes:

Encase v. 7.04

FTK v. 4.01

Smart 3-26-12

X-ways forensics v. 16.5

SIFT v. 2.13



Any other tool you want us to test? Let me know in the comments below

I'll post my results as we finish a round of tests and as always a large case could easily distract me!

Hello possible CEIC attendee reader,
                                                            My class 'anti-anti forensics' will be tuesday at 2:00pm and is apperantly full from what I saw in the regestration page. For those of you who wanted to attend it but didn't get to sign up they normally allow people to queue up at the door to take vacant spots/empty space.

So why would you want to queue up? I'm happy you asked! In this class I plan to preview some research we've been doing on the NTFS $logfile. While I'm not ready to give a presentation dedicated to that, I've submitted to blackhat for that (please pick me blackhat reviewers), I will be showing what I consider to be amazing new tricks to defeat anti forensic tools using the NTFS $logfile.

As in prior presentations I will make my slides available on the blog afterwords for anyones review, but I don't feel that they really ever capture everything that I talk about. I'm much more of a talker than a slide writer so my slides typically just cover major topics and points rather than the details that I would hope you want to hear.

See you there!

Hello Readers,
                         I think a lot of us are still using the old tool Shadowcopy to explore shadowcopies from forensic images mounted. While we know how to mount volume shadow copies to mount points within our system, I personally always liked the interface shadowcopy provided me to jump between restore points and browser their contents. Since Shadowcopy hasn't been updated in over a year one I was happy to new someone else pick up the guantlet of a GUI based VSS explorer.

The entrant? Shadowkit which is currently available for free on the website www.shadowkit.com. I've tested the tool on my own systems it's quick and has some nice features that I've been wanting from Shadowexplorer such as:

1. File list exporting
2. Filtering shadow copies of your local system versus shadow copies from mounted images
3. drop downs for machine names as well as individual volumes backed up, preventing confusion with imported shadow copies
4. MAC and attributes displayed within the interface for each file
5. The ability to open files within the tool without having to export them, it places them in a temp directory for viewing
6. Extension filtering

In talking to the author he has more features planned with an eye towards the needs of the DFIR community so I'm expecting good things.