Daily Blog #34: Saturday Reading 7/26/13

Saturday Reading by David Cowen - Hacking Exposed Computer Forensics Blog

Hello Reader,
        It's Saturday, time to put on a long movie for the little ones while you fire up the web browser to prepare for another week of deep dives into forensic images. This week we have links to deep reads on a wide range of topics so I hope you'll stay informed as we all move forward towards the quest for new knowledge of artifacts and deeper understanding of what's possible. Don't forget tomorrow's Sunday Funday where you can win a ticket to PFIC!

1. This is an older article but I certainly didn't hear anything about it at the time, http://geeknizer.com/pros-cons-of-html-5-local-database-storage-and-future-of-web-apps/, it has to do with what Blazer Catzen and I are looking into now. Specifically we are researching HTML5 offline content cache databases and what data they are storing that you may currently not be paying attention to. The most relevant example first described to me by Blazer and then after some quick research of the database table names I found the article linked above. The article details how iOS based webkit browsers (safari, firefox, etc..) that visit gmail will have  a summary of the contents of the displayed messages stored in a sqlite database on the device.

The question in my mind is not just how can we extract out and recover more gmail then we knew about before on iOS devices, though that is a great thing, but what other web applications are making use of this feature and on what platforms/browsers? I'll be updating our findings here on the blog and during the forensic lunch (hopefully Blazer will come on!) as we learn more but I think there is a lot more here to discover.

2. Tomorrow while your working on your winning answer you might find some insight from Lee Whitfield on the forensic 4cast, https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cle30c05m88rpjs467k4dnns27k. If you have the time Lee is always informative and entertaining.

3. I do have interests outside of forensics and this article made me want to actually go outside, http://travisgoodspeed.blogspot.com/2013/07/hillbilly-tracking-of-low-earth-orbit.html, and monitor satellites. 

4. It's hard for me not to link to a post that mention's our research, when they add other good methods to detect anti-forensics then I can justify it. Harlan Carvey is still blogging up a storm of useful posts and this one, http://windowsir.blogspot.com/2013/07/howto-determinedetect-use-of-anti.html, based on my interests is one of my favorities in his How To series. 

5. I don't often just link to product pages on Saturday's but I need to this week as this tool helped me out of a jam, http://www.lostpassword.com/kit-forensic.htm. If you are dealing with Windows 7 protected storage encrypted files (intelliforms, chrome logins, dropbox, etc..) you know that you need to know the user's password (something I haven't had to care about in years). Using Passware's tool I was able to recover the plaintext password from the hiberfil in an hour for a password that we had been trying to crack for two months. Do you know of an alternative or free/open source solution? Please comment and let me know!

6. If your looking for something to listen to rather than read check out our first recorded Forensic Lunchcast, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_GynQF3n0&list=PLzO8L5QHW0ME1xEyDBEAjmN_Ew30ewrgX&index=1. We are still trying to decide how often we should do these but we will be doing it again on friday if you want to participate.

7. Last one for the week, it's not often that the cyb3rcrim3 blog mentions civil case so when they do I pay attention http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2013/07/unauthorized-access-email-and-team.html. I'd like to know more about what happened in this case but I thought it was odd that someone would access online webmail to get access to communications when we have such great tools and techniques to do so. I've certainly had people get confused and thought I accessed their accounts to get cached webmail (or json fragments) but this is first I've seen where someone actually did and used the evidence!

That wraps up this saturday reading, I hope these links will keep you busy until next Saturday. You won't have much time to read these tomorrow though because you'll be too busy competing in the next Sunday Funday contest and win a free ticket to PFIC! See you then!


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