Digital Forensics Tools
Digital forensics tools can fall into many different categories, some of which include database forensics, disk and data capture, email analysis, file analysis, file viewers, internet analysis, mobile device analysis, network forensics, and registry analysis. Many tools fulfill more than one function simultaneously, and a significant trend in digital forensics tools are “wrappers”—one that packages hundreds of specific technologies with different functionalities into one overarching toolkit.
New tools are developed every day, both as elite government-sponsored solutions and basement hacker rigs. The recipe for each is a little bit different. Some of these go beyond simple searches for files or images, and delve into the arena of cybersecurity, requiring network analysis or cyber threat assessment. When there is a tool for everything, the most pressing question is which one to use.
Below, ForensicsColleges has collected some of the best tools for digital forensics and cybersecurity. In selecting from the wide range of options, we considered the following criteria:
1. fordability:- Price may not be an indicator of quality, but collaborative peer reviews can be. Most of the tools below are open sourced, and all are free and maintained by a community of dedicated developers.
2. Accessibility:- Unlike some proprietary brands which only sell to law-enforcement entities, all of these are available to individuals.
3. Accountability:- Either through open source projects or real-world testimonials, these technologies have been thoroughly vetted by experts.
Tools Information.
Autopsy is a digital forensics platform and graphical interface that forensic investigators use to understand what happened on a phone or computer. It aims to be an end-to-end, modular solution that is intuitive out of the box. Select modules in Autopsy can do timeline analysis, hash filtering, and keyword search. They can extract web artifacts, recover deleted files from unallocated space, and find indicators of compromise. All of this can be done relatively rapidly.
Autopsy runs background jobs in parallel so that even if a full search takes hours, a user will know within minutes whether targeted keywords have been found. Investigators working with multiple devices can create a central repository through Autopsy that will flag phone numbers, email addresses, or other relevant data points.
Developed by the same team that created The Sleuth Kit, a library of command line tools for investigating disk images, Autopsy is an open source solution, available for free in the interests of education and transparency. The latest version is written in Java, and it is currently only available for Windows.
Digital Forensics Framework
Digital Forensics Framework (DFF) is an open-source computer forensics platform built upon a dedicated Application Programming Interface (API). Equipped with a graphical user interface for simple use and automation, DFF guides a user through the critical steps of a digital investigation and can be used by both professionals and amateurs alike.
The tool can be used to investigate hard drives and volatile memory and create reports about system and user activity on the device in question. The DFF was developed with the three main goals of modularity (allowing for changes to the software by developers), scriptability (allowing for automation), and genericity (keeping the operating-system agnostic to help as many users as possible). The software is available for free on GitHub.
DumpZilla performs browser analysis, specifically of Firefox, Iceweasel, and Seamonkey clients. It allows for the visualization and customized search and extraction of cookies, downloads, history, bookmarks, cache, add-ons, saved passwords, and session data.
Developed in Python, it works under Linux and Windows 32/64 bit systems, and DumpZilla is available for free from the developer’s website. While this was created as a standalone tool, its specific nature and lean packaging make it a strong component of future digital forensics suites.
The recipient of SC Magazine’s “Best Computer Forensic Solution” award for 10 consecutive years, EnCase is considered the gold standard in forensic cybersecurity investigations, including mobile acquisitions. Since 1998, EnCase has offered forensic software to help professionals find evidence to testify in criminal investigation cases involving cybersecurity breaches by recovering evidence and analyzing files on hard drives and mobile phones.
Offering a comprehensive software lifecycle package from triage to final reports, EnCase also features platforms such as OpenText Media Analyzer which reduces the amount of content for investigators to manually review to close cases faster. With four site license options for small companies; federal, state, and local law enforcement; consulting organizations; and colleges and universities, offers criminal justice evidence analysis through just a few clicks.
In order for tools such as The Sleuth Kit by Autopsy to work properly, original digital copies of hard drives must be preserved before evidence can be extracted. Enter FTK Imager; a free tool that analyzes images of a drive and preserves the original integrity of the evidence without affecting its original state.
This tool can read all operating systems and enables users to recover files that have been deleted from digital recycle bins. It can parse XFS files and create hashes of files to check data integrity.
The Volatility Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the use of memory analysis within the forensics community. Its primary software is an open-source framework for incident response and malware detection through volatile memory (RAM) forensics. This allows the preservation of evidence in memory that would otherwise be lost during a system shutdown.
Written in Python and supportive of almost all 32-bit and 64-bit machines, it can sift through cached sectors, crash dumps, DLLs, network connections, ports, process lists, and registry files. The tool is available for free, and the code is hosted on GitHub.
ProDiscover Basic is a free digital forensic tool that like Autopsy has a graphical user interface. This forensic tool is designed to make copies of the hard disk without altering any data on this. ProDiscover Basic also permits to create images of USB flash memory, RAM memory images, BIOS image and hard drives images. Once the image is ready, we can analyse in detail the evidence found for this wonderful software. Some features of this digital forensic tool are:
View Deleted files, Search for contents of a disk, Retrieve a file that was accidentally deleted, Registry view, Event log view, Internet history view, View logs, Hashing MD5, SHA1 & SHA256, Auto verify image Checksum, Signature analysis, Forensic report.
I can personally say that I really like the report generated by ProDiscover Basic. This report is very comprehensive and detailed. I strongly believe that this software produces better reports that the reports made by Autopsy.
Wireshark is the world’s most-used network protocol analysis tool, implemented by governments, private corporations, and academic institutions across the world. As the continuation of a project that began in 1998, Wireshark lets a user see what is happening on a network at the microscopic level. By capturing network traffic, users can then scan for malicious activity.
Captured network data can be viewed on a graphical user interface on Windows, Linux, OSx, and several other operating systems. The data can be read from Ethernet Bluetooth, USB, and several others, while the output can be exported to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text.
Wireshark’s applications remain primarily in cybersecurity, but there are digital forensics investigation applications as well. Less about the smoking gun than the breadcrumb trail, Wireshark can point an investigator in the direction of malicious activity so that it can be tracked down and investigated.
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