Some of the top data breaches are;
JP Morgan ChaseBank of AmericaHSBCTD BankTargetTumblerHome DepotMySpaceeBayAdobe System InciMesh
Juniper Research suggests Cybercrime will cost over $5 trillion to the business by 2024. So computer forensic expert demand will also increase. Tools are the administrator’s best friend; using the right tool always helps you to move things faster and make you productive. Forensic investigation is always challenging as you may gather all the information you could for the evidence and mitigation plan. Here are some of the computer forensic investigator tools you would need. Most of them are free!
Autopsy
Autopsy is a GUI-based open source digital forensic program to analyze hard drives and smartphones efficiently. Autospy is used by thousands of users worldwide to investigate what happened on the computer. It’s widely used by corporate examiners, military to investigate, and some of the features are.
Email analysisFile type detectionMedia playbackRegistry analysisPhotos recovery from memory cardExtract geolocation and camera information from JPEG filesExtract web activity from a browserShow system events in a graphical interfaceTimeline analysisExtract data from Android – SMS, call logs, contacts, etc.
It has extensive reporting to generate in HTML, XLS file format.
Encrypted Disk Detector
Encrypted Disk Detector can be helpful to check encrypted physical drives. It supports TrueCrypt, PGP, BitLocker, Safeboot encrypted volumes.
Wireshark
Wireshark is a network capture and analyzer tool to see what’s happening in your network. Wireshark will be handy to investigate the network-related incident.
Magnet RAM Capture
You can use Magnet RAM capture to capture the physical memory of a computer and analyze artifacts in memory. It supports the Windows operating system.
Network Miner
An interesting network forensic analyzer for Windows, Linux & MAC OS X to detect OS, hostname, sessions, and open ports through packet sniffing or by PCAP file. Network Miner provides extracted artifacts in an intuitive user interface.
NMAP
NMAP (Network Mapper) is one of the most popular networks and security auditing tools. NMAP is supported on most of the operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS, HP-UX, etc. It’s open-source so free.
RAM Capturer
RAM Capturer by Belkasoft is a free tool to dump the data from a computer’s volatile memory. It’s compatible with Windows OS. Memory dumps may contain encrypted volume’s password and login credentials for webmails and social network services.
Forensic Investigator
If you are using Splunk, then Forensic Investigator will be a convenient tool. It’s a Splunk app and has many tools combined.
WHOIS/GeoIP lookupPingPort scannerBanner grabberURL decoder/parserXOR/HEX/Base64 converterSMB Share/NetBIOS viewerVirus Total lookup
FAW
FAW (Forensics Acquisition of Websites) is to acquire web pages for forensic investigation, which has the following features.
Capture the entire or partial pageCapture all types of imageCapture HTML source code of the web pageIntegrate with Wireshark
HashMyFiles
HashMyFiles will help you to calculate the MD5 and SHA1 hashes. It works on almost all the latest Windows OS.
Crowd Response
Response by Crowd Strike is a windows application to gather system information for incident response and security engagements. You can view the results in XML, CSV, TSV, or HTML with the help of CRConvert. It runs on 32 or 64 bit of Windows XP above. Crowd Strike has some other helpful tools for investigation.
Totrtilla – anonymously route TCP/IP and DNS traffic through Tor.Shellshock Scanner – scan your network for shellshock vulnerability.Heartbleed scanner – scan your network for OpenSSL heart bleed vulnerability.
NFI Defraser
Defraser forensic tool may help you to detect full and partial multimedia files in the data streams.
ExifTool
ExifTool helps you to read, write, and edit meta information for a number of file types. It can read EXIF, GPS, IPTC, XMP, JFIF, GeoTIFF, Photoshop IRB, FlashPix, etc.
Toolsley
Toolsley got more than ten useful tools for investigation.
File signature verifierFile identifierHash & ValidateBinary inspectorEncode textData URI generatorPassword generator
SIFT
SIFT (SANS investigative forensic toolkit) workstation is freely available as Ubuntu 14.04. SIFT is a suite of forensic tools you need and one of the most popular open source incident response platform.
Dumpzilla
Extract all exciting information from Firefox, Iceweasel and Seamonkey browser to be analyzed with Dumpzilla.
Browser History
Foxton has two free exciting tools.
ForensicUserInfo
Extract the following information with ForensicUserInfo.
RIDLM/NT HashPassword reset/Account expiry dateLogin count/fail dateGroupsProfile path
Kali Linux
Kali Linux is one of the most popular operating systems for security and penetration testing, but it has forensic capability too. There are more than 100 tools so I am sure you will find one for your need.
Paladin
PALADIN forensic suite – the world’s most famous Linux forensic suite is a modified Linux distro based on Ubuntu available in 32 and 64 bit. Paladin has more than 100 tools under 29 categories, almost everything you need to investigate an incident. Autospy is included in the latest version – Paladin 6.
Sleuth Kit
The Sleuth Kit is a collection of command-line tools to investigate and analyze volume and file systems to find the evidence.
CAINE
CAINE (Computer Aided Investigate Environment) is a Linux distro that offers the complete forensic platform which has more than 80 tools for you to analyze, investigate, and create an actionable report.
Conclusion
I hope the above tools help you handle the Cybersecurity incident more efficiently and make the investigation process faster. If you are new to forensic investigation then you may want to check out this course.
