Digital forensics is mainly a process the identification, preservation, analyzation and other documentation of digital evidence. This is mainly done to present the evidence in the court as per the requirement.
Basically, computer forensics tools are designed to make sure that whatever information got extracted from the computer is accurate and reliable. There are a wide variety of different type computer forensics tools available, those are discussing below:
Disk and Data Capture Tools:
In this, the data capture tool mainly focuses on the system analysis and extracts the potential forensic artifacts, including files and emails. This is one of the core parts of the forensics process, and it focuses many forensics tools.
An autopsy is well-known as a popular forensics tool. These are mainly designed to analyze the disk image and allow to perform anything in-depth. It has a wide variety of features which include functionality, and it is a good starting point for any computer forensics investigation. This Autopsy and The Sleuth Kit are both available for Windows and Unix.
You can get many other disk and data capture tools.
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File Viewers:
Autopsy and The Sleuth Kit are designed in such a way that they can examine the disk images of a hard drive. If you think about the image, then its benefits are amazing. This type of images allows the investigator to prove that they did not modify the drive and can affect any forensic results.
X-Ways forensics is one of the best commercial digital forensics platforms for the Windows application. This mainly offers a very much stripped down version, which is also called an X-Ways investigator. It is a central selling point designed in such a way that it is resource-efficient and it is very much capable of running the USB stick. In addition, It boasts does the impressive array of any features.
File Analysis Tools:
In the file analysis tool, you can understand how analysis can be done through the tool. EnCase is a commercial forensics platform that supports evidence collection of more than twenty-five different types. In that includes GPS, mobile devices, desktops, and much more. Forensic investigators inspect the collected data and make a wide range of reports based on the templates.
For memory and file analysis, another popular tool available is called Mandiant RedLine. It helps collect the information about the running process and drive the memory card to gather the registry data, metadata, service, tasks, network information, and much more.
Registry Analysis Tools:
This is a Windows registry that servers database to configure the OS, and it allows running the application on it. It contains a great deal which uses for the other helpful information in the forensic analysis.
If we talk about the best registry analysis tool the first name comes to our mind; Registry Recon, which helps extract the registry information to rebuild the registry representation. It helps to rebuild registries from both previous and current windows installation.
Internet Analysis Tools:
If we talk about the internet analyze tool, only one name comes into the mind WindowsSCOPE. It is a commercial memory forensics tool that is directly connected with the internet. This tool mainly uses reverse engineering malware which can analyse the Windows Kernel, DLLs, drivers and other physical and virtual memory.
Email Analysis Tools:
You need to analyse the file system which stays in the volatile memory that is RAM. Email analysis is directly connected to the memory forensics, and few are mainly focusing on capturing information which has already been a store.
Volatility is one of the memory forensics frameworks which mainly uses for the incident response for malware analysis. Through this tool, you can extract the information while running time. It also works with the network sockets, DLLs, network connection, and other registry hives. This also helps to extract the information from the dump file of windows and hibernation files. This comes under the GPL license.
Mobile Devices Analysis Tools:
In this era, mobile devices are a essential part of everyone’s life. This is the primary method through which people are accessing the internet. Unfortunately, there are few mobile forensics tool which has a special focus on every mobile device.
Oxygen Forensic Detective is one of bets mobile devices capable of extracting the data from different platforms like loT, drones, cloud services, backup, media cards and other desktop platforms. This gets used as a physical method that can bypass the device security (including screen lock) and also helps to collect the authentication data for the various mobile application.
Oxygen is one type of commercial product that got distributed as a USB dongle. There are many other in mobile device analysis like XRY, Cellebrite UFED, etc.
Network Forensics Tools:
Maximum cyberattack happens over the network, and it is very useful source for forensic data. These tools enable the forensic investigator where it can work effectively to analyze the network traffic.
Wireshark is one of the popular network traffic which is in existence. This tool is perfect for capturing the live traffic or capturing the file which is saved. It has numerous protocol dissectors, which are even user-friendly. Its interface makes the things easy to inspect the content of which got capture the traffic and it search for the forensic evidence within that. There are many other tools which includes network miner and Xplico.
Database Forensics Tools:
There are many free and open-source tools and it comes under several Linux distribution. This has been created to aggregate these to provide all-in-one toolkit for the forensics investigators.
There is one famous tool called CAINE (Computer Aided Investigative Environment). It is mainly created for digital forensics and it creates the environment so that it integrates the existing software tool in a user-friendly manner. The most important factor is this is an open-source tool.
Final Thoughts:
Digital forensics is one of the best tools to fulfill the constant demand where the huge number of cyberattacks happens. As the data breaches grow there are many regulatory requirements that will become stricter and organizations need the ability to determine the scope and provide the impact on the potential incident.
The above tool lists are the most popular tool for forensic analysis. In few cases, they have the same functionality, so choices come depending on the cost and personal preferences. So only we have started with the digital forensics tool and finishing with Linux platforms. There are many free tools are available in the list which you can install and configure according to your preferences.
