Tuesday 28 August 2012

Dawn of the forensicator of the dead

YALG!  Yet Another Linux Geek blogging.   I'm afraid I no longer have a functioning cerebrum so can't compete with most of the very intelligent (and annoyingly alive) linux DFIR types out there.  Hopefully this blog will have a vague appeal to those who have dipped their toe into the murky world of Linux and then pathetically ran away screaming at the incomprehensibility of it all, or indeed those who haven't yet had to sheer life affirming joy of spending years in the trenches of front line forensics and want to know a smidgeon more.
 
I have developed a system of "enhanced previewing" of computer system and storage devices that allowed my team to get rid of the soul-destroying weight of computer backlogs.  As it is a Linux system unencumbered with dingle-dangle-dongles and suchlike, it can be deployed on as many systems as space allows.   You simply boot the suspects machine with the CD or thumbdrive, and then in a forensically sound manner (or at least I hope it is or I am going to look VERY foolish) plunder the drive for potential evidence that is then exported out to an external drive, by invoking a single command (or pressing an icon for you gui jockeys!).   The output can be viewed on any PC, those machines that don't contain any evidence can be eliminated from further examination.   Those that do contain evidence can then be tortured by your forensic tools of your choice - however the granular nature of the output of my system means that you know where to look for the evidence e.g in zip files in unallocated space and therefore do your forensic evidential recovery much more quickly.   The system is essentially a Linux boot CD which I have customised + 50,000 lines of ham-fisted bash scripting wot I writ.
  
I have learned many painful lessons (at least they would have been painful if I had a working Parietal Lobe) and some interesting stuff.  So if you want to know how to recovery specific file types PROPERLY, identify encrypted data, recover encryption keys, review hundreds of hours of movie footage in minutes, classify files according to the language that they are written in, process all types of email, recover facebook artifacts reliably and loads of other stuff, then stay tuned.  I will be sharing bash/shell code that you can mock unrelentingly (and possibly use in your cases).   So there will be some very basic stuff and some more challenging stuff....now what first?

No comments:

Post a Comment