Guten tag Reader,
It's time to wrap up this series and move onto to other topics. I hope you've found these scenarios and how I deal with them from my light go bag helpful. Hopefully I can help you lighten your load when you are out in the field, it really is a more pleasant experience. In this post we will cover handling all the assorted storage locations you might receive and how I deal with them.
CDs/DVDs - Imaging these is fairly straight forward as I'm not aware of any operating system that tries to write to a CD/DVD rewritable on insert. Remember not all CDs/DVDs are simple write once media, if the burns are layered in sessions you can recover the prior sessions burned once imaged.
MMC/SD Cards - Many of these actually have switches to make them read only, but otherwise I will either boot into Linux to acquire these read only or enable the usb write block hack and plug in a usb card reader.
External drives - I don't carry a USB write blocker because I haven't found a usb 3.0 one yet and they don't always work with the random drives I encounter. So instead I use the usb write block hack to acquire the drive if I can't easily access the underlying drive and attach it via SATA. This is also why I make sure my acquisition system has eSATA so I can always have a writeable external storage interface available to me and I can leave my USB ports read only when acquiring.
Email accounts on mail servers - Many times i'll be asked to preserve the contents of a mailbox I use a piece of software from transend called transend forensic migrator for this. Transend supports a large variety of mail servers (Exchange, Lotus, Groupwise Imap, etc..) so it makes my life easier to just plug in one or one hundred credentials (via batch mode) and have all the mail stored in your choice of output format (pst, mbox, etc..) with a log of its actions when its done. You can even enable filter options to limit the data your acquiring.
Webmail servers - One of the other types of email we are asked to grab is webmail, I've found the easiest way to deal with grabbing someones webmail is to search for the webmail providers instructions for email access from a smart phone. Through those instructions they will typically identify an Imap or Pop3 server that a phone and your software can connect to and grab the data.
Sharepoint - There are two good ways to deal with sharepoint, neither of which involve grabbing the underlying database. You can access a sharepoint website through webdav and copy down the contents or use a commercial tool like ontrack powercontrols to grab the data if you have the budget.
That's all I can think of right now but I think this capture 99% of what I deal with when out in the field and how I deal with it. Tomorrow we will switch topics to 'web 2.0' forensics and then make time Sunday for the weekly contest where this weeks prize is a free ticket to PFIC!
It's time to wrap up this series and move onto to other topics. I hope you've found these scenarios and how I deal with them from my light go bag helpful. Hopefully I can help you lighten your load when you are out in the field, it really is a more pleasant experience. In this post we will cover handling all the assorted storage locations you might receive and how I deal with them.
CDs/DVDs - Imaging these is fairly straight forward as I'm not aware of any operating system that tries to write to a CD/DVD rewritable on insert. Remember not all CDs/DVDs are simple write once media, if the burns are layered in sessions you can recover the prior sessions burned once imaged.
MMC/SD Cards - Many of these actually have switches to make them read only, but otherwise I will either boot into Linux to acquire these read only or enable the usb write block hack and plug in a usb card reader.
External drives - I don't carry a USB write blocker because I haven't found a usb 3.0 one yet and they don't always work with the random drives I encounter. So instead I use the usb write block hack to acquire the drive if I can't easily access the underlying drive and attach it via SATA. This is also why I make sure my acquisition system has eSATA so I can always have a writeable external storage interface available to me and I can leave my USB ports read only when acquiring.
Email accounts on mail servers - Many times i'll be asked to preserve the contents of a mailbox I use a piece of software from transend called transend forensic migrator for this. Transend supports a large variety of mail servers (Exchange, Lotus, Groupwise Imap, etc..) so it makes my life easier to just plug in one or one hundred credentials (via batch mode) and have all the mail stored in your choice of output format (pst, mbox, etc..) with a log of its actions when its done. You can even enable filter options to limit the data your acquiring.
Webmail servers - One of the other types of email we are asked to grab is webmail, I've found the easiest way to deal with grabbing someones webmail is to search for the webmail providers instructions for email access from a smart phone. Through those instructions they will typically identify an Imap or Pop3 server that a phone and your software can connect to and grab the data.
Sharepoint - There are two good ways to deal with sharepoint, neither of which involve grabbing the underlying database. You can access a sharepoint website through webdav and copy down the contents or use a commercial tool like ontrack powercontrols to grab the data if you have the budget.
That's all I can think of right now but I think this capture 99% of what I deal with when out in the field and how I deal with it. Tomorrow we will switch topics to 'web 2.0' forensics and then make time Sunday for the weekly contest where this weeks prize is a free ticket to PFIC!
