Tools Flashcards
Autopsy
A digital forensics platform and graphical interface to The Sleuth Kit (TSK) and other digital forensics tools. Law enforcement, military, and corporate examiners use it to investigate activities on a computer. It can even be used to recover photos from a camera’s memory card.
The Sleuth Kit (TSK)
A library and collection of command-line tools that assist in the investigation of disk images. The core functionality allows the user to analyze volume and file-system data.
The plug-in framework allows the user to incorporate additional modules to analyze file contents and build automated systems.
The Sleuth Kit (TSK): fsstat
Displays the details associated with a file system. The output is specific to the file system. At a minimum, the command displays the range of metadata values (inode numbers) and content units (blocks or clusters). Also displayed are details from the superblock, such as mount times and features. For file systems using groups (FFS and ext2), the tool lists the layout of each group. For a FAT file system, the file allocation table is in a condensed format.
The Sleuth Kit (TSK): istat
Displays the uid, gid, mode, size, link number, modified, accessed, changed times, and all the disk units a structure has allocated.
The Sleuth Kit (TSK): fls
Lists the files and directory names in the image and can display the filenames of recently deleted files for a directory by using the given inode. If the inode argument is not given, the inode value for the root directory is used.
The Sleuth Kit (TSK): img_stat
Displays the details associated with an image file. The output is specific to the image format. At a minimum, the size will be given, and the byte range of each file will be given for split image formats.
RAID 0: Disk Striping
Simplest RAID level and does not involve any redundancy. First, it fragments files into an array having a user-defined stripe size. Subsequently, it sends these stripes to every disk in the array. Provides no redundancy. Best overall performance.
RAID 1: Disk Mirroring
Generally executes mirroring as it duplicates, or copies drive data on two different drives using a hardware RAID controller or software. If one of the drives fails, the other functions as a single drive until the user replaces the failed drive with a new one.
RAID 2
The only level among all the RAID levels that does not implement even one of the standard techniques, namely, parity, mirroring, and striping. It uses a technique similar to striping with parity. It splits data at the bit level and distributes the data to numerous data disks and redundancy disks.
RAID 3
Uses byte-level stripping with a dedicated parity disk, which stores checksums. It also supports a special processor for the calculation of parity codes. This RAID level cannot accommodate multiple data requests simultaneously. If a failure occurs, it enables data recovery by an applicable calculation of the parity bytes and the remaining bytes that relate with them.
RAID 5
Uses byte-level data striping across multiple drives and distributes the parity information among all member drives. The data writing process is slow. Further, it requires a minimum of three drives to set up. It stripes and distributes the error detection and correction code or data and parity code across three or more drives.
RAID 10
Also known as RAID 1+0, it is a combination of RAID 0 (striping of volume data) and RAID 1 (disk mirroring) to protect data. It request at least four drives to implement. It has the same fault tolerance as RAID level 1 and the same overheads as mirroring alone. It allows the mirroring of disks in pairs for redundancy and improved performance, following which it stripes data across multiple disks for maximum performance. The user retrieves data from the RAID if one disk in each mirrored pair is operational; however, if two disks in the same mirrored pair fail, the data becomes unavailable.
RAID 6
An upgraded version of RAID 5 in which the dual parity is distributed on each RAID 5 disk to offer high fault and drive-failure tolerance. It can withstand double-disk failure. However, it has two sets of parity data of each write operation, which results in a decrease in write performance and server performance overhead. It requires a minimum of 4 drives and a maximum of 16 drives to be implemented.
RAID 1E (Striped Mirroring)
A combination of RAID 1 (data mirroring) and RAID 0 (data striping). Data written in a stripe on one disk are mirrored to a stripe on the next drive in the array. It requires a minimum of 3 drives to be implemented. The main advantage over RAID 1 is that its arrays can be implemented using an odd number of disks and support single-disk failure, instead of multiple-disk failure.
RAID 5E
Similar to RAID 5 but includes an extended spare drive, which can be used for input/output operations and provides better performance than RAID 5. The extended spare drive created within it can be used with the same array. It requires a minimum of 4 drives and a maximum of 16 drives in a single array to be implemented.
RAID 5EE
Similar to RAID level 5E and includes an additional hot spare drive in the RAID 5 array that can be used for input/output operations. It requires a minimum of 4 drives and a maximum of 16 drives in an array. The spare area is distributed at the end of the disk components in RAID 5E, whereas it is distributed next to parity stripes in this. The additional hot spare drive is empty by default and can be used for copying data from a failed drive.
RAID 50 (striping with parity)
A combination of RAID 5 (striping with parity) and RAID 0 (disk striping). Its configuration requires a minimum of 6 drives. It provides a high degree of fault tolerance since one drive in each sub-array may fail without the loss of data.
RAID 60
A combination of RAID 6 (distributed parity) and RAID 0 (disk striping). It supports two independent parity blocks per stripe. Its configuration requires a minimum of 6 drives. It provides a high degree of fault tolerance because each of the RAID 60 sets can survive double disk failure without losing any data. It is one of the most complicated RAID implementations, and after a disk failure, it takes a longer time to retrieve parity information than a mirrored solution.
Order of Volatility
- Registers, processor cache
- Routing table, process table, kernel statistics, and memory
- Temporary file systems
- Disk or other storage media
- Remote logging and monitoring data related to the target system
- Physical configuration and network topology
- Archival media
Rules of Thumb for Data Acquisition
- Do not work on original digital evidence
- Use clean media to store the copies
- Produce two or more copies of the original media
- Upon creating copies of original media, verify the integrity of copies with the original
Data Acquisition Methodology
- Determining the data acquisition method
- Determining the data acquisition tool
- Sanitizing the target media
- Acquiring volatile data
- Enabling write protection on the evidence media
- Acquiring non-volatile data
- Planning for contingency
- Validating data acquisition
R-Studio
The data recovery solution for recovery of files from NTFS, NTFS5, ReFS, FAT12/16/32, exFAT, HFS/HFS+, and APFS (Macintosh), Little and Big Endian variants of UFS1/UFS2 (FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris), and Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 FS (Linux) partitions. It also uses raw file recovery (scan for known file types) for heavily damaged or unknown file systems. It function on local and network disks, even if such partitions are formatted, damaged, or deleted.
Recover My Files
A data recovery software that recovers deleted files/data from Windows Recycle Bin and files lost due to formatting or corruption of a hard drive, virus or Trojan injection, and unexpected system shutdown or software failure.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard
Software is used to perform format recovery and unformat and recover deleted files emptied from Recycle Bin or data lost due to partition loss or damage, software crash, virus infection, unexpected shutdown, or any other unknown reasons under Windows 10, 8, 7, 2000/XP/Vista/2003/2008 R2 SP1/Windows 7 SP1. This software supports hardware RAID and hard drive, USB drive, SD card, memory card, etc.
DiskDigger
A program that undeletes and recovers lost files from hard drives, memory cards, and USB flash drives. This tool can be used to recover documents or photos accidentally deleted from the computer or from a reformatted camera memory card or can be used to check the files that are on an old USB drive.
Handy Recovery
Data recovery software designed to restore files accidentally deleted from hard disks and memory cards. The program can recover files damaged by virus attacks, power failures, and software faults, or files from deleted and formatted partitions. If a program does not use the Recycle Bin when deleting files, it can restore such files. It can also recover files moved from the Recycle Bin after it has been emptied. It can also restore the full branch of a folder tree containing selected files and folders. It can also recover alternate data streams, which are used on the NTFS file system to store additional information about files.
Quick Recovery
Recovers files that have been lost, deleted, corrupted, or even deteriorated. The application searches, scans, and recovers files that are encrypted and password protected and restores them.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
Recovers lost, deleted, or inaccessible data from Windows OS HDDs and other storage media. It helps to recover data lost due to hard drive corruption, formatting, and virus attack.
Total Recall
Recovers lost data from hard drives, RAID, photos, deleted files, iPods, and even removable disks connected via FireWire or USB.
Advanced Disk Recovery
Scans the entire system for deleted files and folders and recovers them. It scans the hard drives, partitions, external devices, and even CDs and DVDs for recoverable files. It provides two types of scans: the Quick Scan that uses MFT and the Deep Scan that uses file signatures. Once the scan is complete, one can either preview the files/folders or recover them to a preferred location.
Windows Data Recovery Software
Can recover accidentally deleted files, including files emptied from the Recycle Bin and from Windows Explorer with Shift + Delete. This tool also allows one to recover data from a reformatted partition (to any file system), and from a corrupted, deleted, or missing partition.
Orion File Recovery Software
Searches for deleted files on the hard drive, or any external or portable drive connected to the computer. Files that are not overwritten can either be recovered or permanently deleted to prevent future recovery.
Data Rescue PC
Recovers files from a crashed or virus-corrupted hard drive. It recovers an external drive or secondary drive. It scans the drive for the files and copies them to the second drive.
Recover4all Professional
Recovers (undeletes) files that were accidentally deleted under Windows. It recovers the files that were accidently deleted from the Recycle Bin, or if the drive was formatted, or if the file system was damaged. It does not require installation and can run directly from a USB disk, flash drive, etc.
Recuva
Recovers deleted files from one’s Windows computer, recycle bin, digital camera card, or MP3 player.
Active@ File Recovery
Contains a CD/DVD ISO image that allows one to burn a bootable CD or DVD with a lightweight version of Windows 7 running in RAM (WinPE 3.0). It can recover data in case the system is not bootable and cannot attach the damaged hard disk drive to another machine.
Pandora Recovery
Allows one to find and recover recoverable deleted files from NTFS and FAT-formatted volumes, regardless of their type; it can recover pictures, songs, movies, or documents. It will scan the hard drive and build an index of existing and deleted files and directories (folders) on any logical drive of the computer with supported file format. Once the scanning is complete, the user gets full control over the files to be recovered and the destination to be used for recovery.
Ontrack EasyRecovery
File recovery software unites legacy backup catalogs from various systems and mediums into a single inventory. It provides support to multiple workstations and allows users to create catalog on their own. Once the catalogs are received, they are ingested into it, and users can access them through a secured online application. It has recovery tools such as email recovery; hex viewer; self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (SMART); bad block/block usage diagnostics; imaging tools; copy disk; and refresh disk. It offers hard drive monitoring with SMART scan to protect the hard drives and erase functions to free-up storage.
Seagate File Recovery Software
Recovers the files and rescue service plans for storage devices. The tool recovers files from desktops, laptops, and external hard drives as well as tablets, and on-chip memory in smartphones.
Wise Data Recovery
Data recovery software used to retrieve the lost or formatted data, or data that is lost due to system crash. It can recover lost files from hard drive, external hard drive, USB drive, memory card, digital camera, mobile phone, MP3 player, and other storage media.
Glary Undelete
Software that works on FAT and NTFS file systems. This tool recovers the files emptied from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down. It recovers files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes, and viruses. It can recover files that the user has compressed or fragmented or even encrypted on NTFS file system.
Disk Drill
A data recovery software for Windows PC. It can recover data from internal and external hard drives, USB flash drives, iPods, memory cards. It can recover files from partition loss, hard drive reformatting, failed bootups, accidental deletion, Recycle Bin cleanup, and memory card corruption.
PhotoRec
File data recovery software recovers lost files; video, documents, and archives from hard disks; CD-ROMs; and lost pictures from digital camera memory. It can recover media’s file system if it has been severely damaged or reformatted. This tool recovers lost partitions on different file systems and makes non-bootable disks function.
DDR Professional Recovery Software
Recovers deleted files in all major data loss situations, whether lost from fixed hard drive partitions or from any USB storage media drive. The advanced data retrieval tool recovers files deleted from memory cards, digital cameras, USB drives, external HDDs, and music players, and it even recovers deleted hard drive partition files in a few mouse clicks.
File Scavenger
A file “undelete” and data recovery utility for Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, Server 2003, 2000, NT, and ME/98/95. It recovers files that have been accidentally deleted (including files removed from the Recycle Bin, in a DOS window, from a network drive, and from Windows Explorer with the SHIFT key held down) provided that recovery is attempted before the files are permanently overwritten by new data. It supports basic and dynamic disks, NTFS compression, alternate data streams, sparse files, Unicode filenames, etc. Except in severe cases, both the file and the folder path leading to the file can be recovered.
GetDataBack
Recovers data if the hard drive’s partition table, boot record, FAT/MFT, or root directory are lost or damaged; data was lost due to a virus attack; the drive was formatted; fdisk has been run; a power failure has caused a system crash; files were lost due to a software failure; or files were accidentally deleted. It can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. This tool can likewise be used even if all directory information - not just the root directory - is missing.
UndeletePlus
Scans a computer or storage medium for deleted files and restores them on command. It works with computers, flash drives, cameras, and other forms of data storage. It scans the device, selects the files needed to recover, and restores the information or picture with the click of a button.
VirtualLab
A data recovery software that works with all Windows OSs from Windows 98 to Windows 10, 8, 7, FAT 12/16/32, and NTFS file systems. It can restore the deleted files from lost/damaged partitions, formatted disks, deleted emails, hard drives and RAID systems, and photos and flash memory cards.
Active@ UNDELETE
A data recovery software that helps to recover deleted files and restore deleted partitions. It restores the deleted volumes/partitions in-place, fixing volume boots sectors and ability to rollback partition changes. It supports Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP, 2003/2008 Server OSs.
WinUndelete
Software can be used to recover deleted files from a hard drive, flash drive, USB external drive, digital camera card, and more. It recovers deleted files after emptying the Recycle Bin or by using other deletion actions that bypass the Recycle Bin.
R-Undelete
Recovers files from FAT and NTFS file systems. It recovers files on any local disk recognized by the software. An additional file recovery algorithm increases the file recovery quality. It can be run from disk and folder context menus. Graphics files, videos, and audio files can be previewed with it.
DDrescue
A data recovery tool. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors. The basic operation is fully automatic. If you use the mapfile feature of it, the data is rescued very efficiently, (only the blocks needed are read). It may be interrupted and resumed.
R-Studio for Linux
A data recovery software. It recovers data from logical disks and partitions as well as disks and partitions that have been re-formatted, damaged or deleted. In addition to disks with common Linux file systems, it recovers files from Windows, FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris, and Macintosh formatted disks. Moreover, raw file recovery (scan for known file types) can be used for heavily damaged or unknown file systems. Recovered files can be saved to disks with any file system supported by the Linux kernel (i.e., ext2, ext3, FAT, NTFS).
Data Recovery for Linux
Recovers lost, formatted or deleted data from Linux based volumes. The software that helps you recover lost or inaccessible data from any Ext4, Ext3, Ext2, exFAT, FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 file system-based LINUX volumes.
Kernel for Linux Data Recovery
- Recovers lost files and folders on Linux system
- Scans and Recovers Linux OS data files
- Performs data recovery from corruption and damages
- Facility to recover Ext2 and Ext3 file systems in Linux OS
Scalpel
A file carving tool that reads a database of header and footer definitions and extracts matching files from a set of image files or raw device files. It is file system independent and will carve files from FATx, NTFS, ext2/3, or raw partitions. It is useful for both digital forensics investigations and file recovery.
Mondo Rescue
A GPL disaster recovery solution. It supports Linux (i386, x86_64, ia64) and FreeBSD (i386). It’s packaged for multiple distributions (Fedora, RHEL, openSuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Mageia, Devian, Ubuntu, Gentoo). It supports tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware RAID, BIOS and UEFI.
Foremost
A console program to recover files based on their headers, footers, and internal data structures. This process is commonly referred to as data carving. It can work on image files, such as those generated by dd, Safeback, Encase, etc, or directly on a drive. The headers and footers can be specified by a configuration file or you can use command line switches to specify built-in file types.
TestDisk
A powerful free data recovery software. It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery is really easy utilizing this tool.
PhotoRec for Linux
File data recovery software that recovers lost files; video, documents, and archives from hard disks; CD-ROMs; and lost pictures from digital camera memory. It can recover media’s file system if it has been severely damaged or reformatted. This tool recovers lost partitions on different file systems and makes non-bootable disks function.
AppleXsoft File Recovery for Mac
A file recovery tool for Mac. The tool scans and recovers files from the hard disk and external storage devices. It supports RAID recovery. The tool includes few advanced tools such as RAID Reconstructor, Mail Recovery, Hex Viewer, SMART, Bad Block Diagnostics, Imaging tools, and Disk Copy