Law Enforcement, Computer Forensics

With the increasing use of digital data and mobile phones, digital forensics has become more important to our local and federal law enforcement agencies as well as many corporations. Cyber crimes are also increasing day by day. As such, companies are also trying to launch more powerful version of the tools, so you need to have access to the latest and most powerful computer technology available. M-Tech has been working with key law enforcement agencies such as the Fairfax County Cyber Crime Division, they are the law enforcement for Washington DC. If the capital of our nation can trust its digital law enforcement to M-Tech Laptops, so can you.
In the field, law enforcement teams may well require rugged laptop or tablets. M-Tech can provide a full rugged line of military and law enforcement rated rugged laptops and tablets. For the digital detectives who work with cell phones and computers related to possible crimes, the law enforcement personnel needs an extremely powerful computer that can bust passwords in a fraction of the time the mass marketed computers would take. The quality enforced on each M-Tech laptops allows for more speed and raw computing power than any similarly configured mass-market computer. For this reason alone, many agencies use the M-Tech D8700 and DQFHD for their Cyber Crime and Computer Forensics.

These computer forensics tools can also be classified into various categories:
Disk and data capture tools
File viewers
File analysis tools
Registry analysis tools
Internet analysis tools
Email analysis tools
Mobile devices analysis tools
Network forensics tools
Database forensics tools

Here is a list of some resources our nations law enforcement and computer forensic corporations are using and developing to be used. Equally important to these software resources is having the computer power needed to bust passwords and retrieve data in a timely process. This is why more and more agencies and corporations are choosing M-Tech for their digital forensic needs. 

1. Digital Forensics Framework

Digital Forensics Framework is another popular platform dedicated to digital forensics. The tool is open source and comes with GPL License. It can be used either by professionals or non-experts without any trouble. It can be used for a digital chain of custody, to access the remote or local devices, forensics of Windows or Linux OS, recovery hidden of deleted files, quick search for files’ metadata, and various other things.

Download: http://www.digital-forensic.org/

2. Open Computer Forensics Architecture

Open Computer Forensics Architecture (OCFA) is another popular distributed open-source computer forensics framework. This framework was built on Linux platform and uses PostgreSQL database for storing data.

It was built by the Dutch National Police Agency for automating digital forensics process. It is available to download under GPL license.

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ocfa/

3. CAINE

CAINE (Computer Aided Investigative Environment) is the Linux distro created for digital forensics. It offers an environment to integrate existing software tools as software modules in a user-friendly manner. This tool is open source.

Read More about it: http://www.caine-live.net/

4. X-Ways Forensics

X-Ways Forensics is an advanced platform for digital forensics examiners. It runs on all available version of Windows. It claims to not be very resource hungry and to work efficiently. If we talk about the features, find the key features in the list below:

• Disk imaging and cloning
• Ability to read file system structures inside various image files
• It supports most of the file systems including FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, TFAT, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, Next3®, CDFS/ISO9660/Joliet, UDF
• Automatic detection of deleted or lost hard disk partition
• Various data recovery techniques and powerful file carving
• Bulk hash calculation
• Viewing and editing binary data structures using templates
• Easy detection of and access NTFS ADS
• A well maintained file header
• Automated activity logging
• Data authenticity
• Complete case management
• Memory and RAM analysis
• Gallery view for pictures
• Internal viewer for Windows registry file
• Automated registry report
• Extracts metadata from various file types
• Ability to extract emails from various available email clients.
• And many more...

You can read the full list here: http://www.x-ways.net/forensics/

5. SANS Investigative Forensics Toolkit – SIFT

SANS Investigative Forensics Toolkit or SIFT is a multi-purpose forensic operating system which comes with all the necessary tools used in the digital forensic process. It is built on Ubuntu with many tools related to digital forensics. Earlier this year, SIFT 3.0 was released. It comes for free or charge and contains free open-source forensic tools.

In a previous post at resource.infosecinstitute.com, we already covered SIFT in detail. You can read those posts about SIFT to know more about this digital forensics platform.

Download: http://digital-forensics.sans.org/community/downloads

6. EnCase

EnCase is another popular multi-purpose forensic platform with many nice tools for several areas of the digital forensic process. This tool can rapidly gather data from various devices and unearth potential evidence. It also produces a report based on the evidence.

This tool does not come for free. 

Read more about EnCase: https://www.guidancesoftware.com/products/Pages/encase-forensic/overview.aspx

7. Registry Recon

Registry Recon is a popular registry analysis tool. It extracts the registry information from the evidence and then rebuilds the registry representation. It can rebuild registries from both current and previous Windows installations.

It is not a free tool. 

Read more about it: http://arsenalrecon.com/apps/recon/

8. The Sleuth Kit

The Sleuth Kit is a Unix and Windows-based tool which helps in forensic analysis of computers. It comes with various tools which help in digital forensics. These tools help in analyzing disk images, performing in-depth analysis of file systems, and various other things.

Read more about it here: http://www.sleuthkit.org/

9. Llibforensics

Libforensics is a library for developing digital forensics applications. It was developed in Python and comes with various demo tools to extract information from various types of evidence.

Read more here: http://code.google.com/p/libforensics/

10. Volatility

Volatility is the memory forensics framework. It used for incident response and malware analysis. With this tool, you can extract information from running processes, network sockets, network connection, DLLs and registry hives. It also has support for extracting information from Windows crash dump files and hibernation files. This tool is available for free under GPL license.

Read more about the tool: http://code.google.com/p/volatility/

11. WindowsSCOPE

WindowsSCOPE is another memory forensics and reverses engineering tool used for analyzing volatile memory. It is basically used for reverse engineering of malware. It provides the capability of analyzing the Windows kernel, drivers, DLLs, virtual and physical memory.

Read more: http://www.windowsscope.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=35&category_id=3&option=com_virtuemart

12. The Coroner’s Toolkit

The Coroner’s Toolkit or TCT is also a good digital forensic analysis tool. It runs under several Unix-related operating systems. It can be used to aid analysis of computer disasters and data recovery.

Read more: http://www.porcupine.org/forensics/tct.html

13. Oxygen Forensic Suite

Oxygen Forensic Suite is a nice software to gather evidence from a mobile phone to support your case. This tool helps in gathering device information (including manufacturer, OS, IMEI number, serial number), contacts, messages (emails, SMS, MMS), recover deleted messages, call logs and calendar information. It also lets you access and analyze mobile device data and documents. It generates easy to understand reports for better understanding.

More information here: http://www.oxygen-forensic.com/en/features

14. Bulk Extractor

Bulk Extractor is also an important and popular digital forensics tool. It scans the disk images, file or directory of files to extract useful information. In this process, it ignores the file system structure, so it is faster than other available similar kinds of tools. It is basically used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in solving cyber crimes.

Download it here: http://digitalcorpora.org/downloads/bulk_extractor/

15. Xplico

Xplico is an open source network forensic analysis tool. It is basically used to extract useful data from applications which use Internet and network protocols. It supports most of the popular protocols including HTTP, IMAP, POP, SMTP, SIP, TCP, UDP, TCP, and others. Output data of the tool is stored in SQLite database of MySQL database. It also supports IPv4 and IPv6 both.

Read more about this tool here: http://www.xplico.org/about

16. Mandiant RedLine

Mandiant RedLine is a popular tool for memory and file analysis. It collects information about running processes on a host, drivers from memory and gathers other data like metadata, registry data, tasks, services, network information and Internet history to build a proper report.

Read more here: https://www.mandiant.com/resources/download/redline

17. Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE)

Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor or COFEE is a toolkit developed for computer forensic experts. This tool was developed by Microsoft to gather evidence from Windows systems. It can be installed on a USB pen drive or external hard disk. Just plug in the USB device in the target computer and it starts a live analysis. It comes with 150 different tools with a GUI based interface to command the tools. It is fast and can perform the whole analysis in as few as 20 minutes. To law enforcement agencies, Microsoft provides free technical support for the tool.

Official website: https://cofee.nw3c.org/

18. P2 eXplorer

P2 eXplorer is a forensic image mounting tool which aims to help to investigate officers with an examination of a case. With this image, you can mount forensic images as a read-only local and physical disc and then explore the contents of the image with file explorer. You can easily view deleted data and unallocated space of the image.

It can mount several images at a time. It supports most of the image formats including EnCasem, SafeBack, PFR, FTK DD, WinImage, Raw images from Linux DD, and VMWare images. It supports both logical and physical image types.

This tool is not free, but you can grab the limited feature version of the tool for free.

Read more here: https://www.paraben.com/p2-explorer.html

19. PlainSight

PlainSight is another useful digital forensics tool. It is a CD-based Knoppix which is a Linux distribution. Some of its uses include viewing Internet histories, data carving, checking USB device usage, memory dumps extracting password hashes, information gathering, examining Windows firewall configuration, seeing recent documents, and other useful tasks. For using this too, you only need to boot from the CD and then follow the instructions.

This tool is available for free.

Read more here: http://www.plainsight.info/index.html

20. XRY

XRY is the mobile forensics tool developed by Micro Systemation. It is used to analyze and recover crucial information from mobile devices. This tool comes with a hardware device and software. Hardware connects mobile phones to PC and software performs the analysis of the device and extract data. It is designed to recover data for forensic analysis.

The latest version of the tool can recover data from all kind of smartphones including Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry. It gathers deleted data from call records, images, SMS and text messages.

Read more about it: http://www.msab.com/xry/what-is-xry

21. HELIX3

HELIX3 is a CD-based digital forensic suite created to be used in incident response. It comes with many open source digital forensics tools including hex editors, data carving, and password cracking tools. If you want the free version, you can go for Helix3 2009R1. After this release, this project was overtaken by a commercial vendor. So, you need to pay for the most recent version of the tool.

This tool can collect data from physical memory, network connections, user accounts, executing processes and services, scheduled jobs, Windows Registry, chat logs, screen captures, SAM files, applications, drivers, environment variables and Internet history. Then it analyzes and reviews the data to generate the compiled results based on reports.

Helix3 2008R1 can be downloaded here: https://e-fenseinc.sharefile.com/d/sda4309a624d48b88

The enterprise version is available here: http://www.e-fense.com/h3-enterprise.php

22. Cellebrite UFED

Cellebrite’s UFED solutions present a unified workflow to allow examiners, investigators and first responders to collect, protect and act decisively on mobile data with the speed and accuracy a situation demands – without ever compromising one for the other. The UFED Pro Series is designed for forensic examiners and investigators who require the most comprehensive, up-to-date mobile data extraction and decoding support available to handle the influx of new data sources. Platform agnostic, the UFED Field Series is designed to unify workflows between the field and lab, making it possible to view, access and share mobile data via in-car workstations, laptops, tablets or a secure, self-service kiosk located at a station.

More information here: http://www.cellebrite.com/Mobile-Forensics

This information was gathered from the internet and M-Tech Laptops, Inc. makes no claims as to the links reliability or their safety. As always use caution when downloading any program from any source.