CF Lab File
CF Lab File
DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
Submitted By Submitted To
Divyanshu Thakur Ms. Allam Venkata Swetha
2K20/IT/47 Dept of Information Technology
Computer Forensics Laboratory
LIST OF EXPERIMENTS
S.L. Experiment Page
No. No.
1 Study of Computer Forensics and different tools used for forensic 2
investigation
2 Study the steps for hiding and extract any text file behind an image 8
file/ Audio file using Command Prompt.
By using the open-source and free suites, we can come to understand how such tools as
EnCase work without the expense. EnCase is the most widely used tool by law
enforcement, but not necessarily the most effective and sophisticated. These tools are
designed for user-friendliness, efficiency, certification, good training, and reporting.
There are a number of the free, open-source forensic suites, including the following
three.
1. The Sleuthkit Kit (TSK)
2. Helix
3. Knoppix
What Is Anti-Forensics?
Anti-forensics are techniques that can be used to obfuscate information and evade the
tools and techniques of the forensic investigator. Some of these techniques include the
following.
• Hiding Data: Hiding data can include such things as encryption and
steganography.
• Artefact wiping: Every attack leaves a signature or artefact behind. Sometimes
it's wise to attempt to wipe these artefacts from the victim machine so as to leave
no tell-tale trail for the investigator.
• Trail Obfuscation: A decent forensic investigator can trail nearly any remote
attack to an IP address and/or MAC address. Trail obfuscation is a technique that
leads them to another source of the attack, rather than the actual attack.
• Change the timestamp: Change the file timestamp (modify, access, and change)
to evade detection by forensic tools.
Forensics tool. Autopsy is a digital forensics platform and graphical interface to The
Sleuth Kit® and other digital forensics tools. It can be used by law enforcement,
military, and corporate examiners to investigate what happened on a computer. You
can even use it to recover photos from your camera's memory card.
CAINE (Computer Aided Investigative Environment)
Open Source Digital investigation software DFF (Digital Forensics Framework) is a free and Open
Source computer forensics software built on top of a dedicated Application Programming Interface
(API). It can be used both by professional and non-expert people in order to quickly and easily
collect, preserve and reveal digital evidence without compromising systems and data.
Free download Partition Recovery Software, Deleted Partition Recovery, Active Partition
Recovery Software. Realize partition data recovery with Free Partition Recovery Software, Free
Active Partition Recovery Software, Free Disk Partition Recovery Tool, Free NTFS Partition
Recovery Tool, Recovery Partition, Hard Disk Recovery, Drive Partition Recovery, Deleted
Partition Recovery and Hard Drive- Partition Recovery Tool. Support FAT12, FAT16, FAT32,
VFAT, NTFS, NTFS5 and Windows 2000 Professional/XP/Vista/7/8 and so on.
EXPERIMENT- 2
Aim: To study the steps for hiding and extract any text file behind an image file/ Audio file
using Command Prompt.
Any file like .rar .jpg .txt or any file can be merged inside another file. In a simple
way, we shall learn how to hide a text file inside an image file using the Command
Prompt.
How to Hide the FILE?
Suppose you have to hide a text file “A.txt” with the image file “B.jpg” and combine
them in a new file as “C.jpg”.Where “C.jpg” is our output file which contains the
text hidden in the image file.
"C.jpg" is the output image inside this out image our file is hidden
How to retrieve the file?
1. locate C.jpg file from where you want to retrieve text data
2. Right-click and open with notepad
Done! Successfully opened! In the last of the notepad, you’ll find the content of the
text file.
Another Method
1. Open Run command window by pressing win + r.
2. Open command prompt by typing cmd and press OK
Windows 7/10: Shift+right click in the folder containing the files will open the
command prompt in that directory Windows: Open command prompt (start->run
cmd), then use cd to get to the folder where the files are stored.
Linux: You know what to do, open terminal and move to the directory containing
files.
We now need to merge these files together, but we want to use a binary merge
to keep the two files intact. With Windows copy command this uses the /B
switch. (Binary Data)
Windows
Code:
copy /b secret.zip + sound.mp3 newfile.mp3
Linux
Code:
cat sound.mp3 secret.zip > newfile.mp3
You should now have gained a new file called newfile.mp3. This should look
identical to the sound you started with when opened with a media player, but with a
secret payload hidden within. Here is the example sound containing a ZIP:
The two simplest ways to get your data back out of these files is to either change the
extension from .mp3 to .zip or to open your chosen ZIP program and open
newfile.mp3 within that. You should now be presented with your original files.
EXPERIMENT- 3
Aim: How to Extract Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) Data from Image Files
using Exifreader Software.
Introduction:
In many cases when a computer, phone, or mobile device is seized for evidence, the
system will have graphic images that might be used as evidence. Obviously, in some
cases, these graphic images may be evidence such as in child pornography cases.
Most digital devices "stamp" information on these graphic images that can tell us a
lot about the who, what, when, and where the pictures were taken. This information
is known as EXIF data and can very often be useful to the forensic investigator.
Exchangeable image file format (EXIF) is a standard set by the digital camera
industry to identify formats for digital images and sound files. This information
includes camera settings, time, date, shutter speed, exposure, whether a flash was
used, compression, the name of the camera, and other information critical to viewing
and editing the image in image-editing software. This information can be useful to
the forensic investigator.
There are numerous applications that can extract this EXIF data from graphic files.
Nearly every one of the major forensic suites (EnCase, FTK, Oxygen, etc.) has this
capability built-in. For this lab, we will be using a simple, Windows-based tool called
ExifReader (free).
Extract EXIF Data from Image Files
Step-01:
Download the ExifReader from the above link and click on the .exe file
(ExifRead.exe) and it will open a clean and simple GUI Wizard as shown below:
Now, simply click on the "Open" button and browse to the pictures from the system
or media. Normally, JPEG and JPG contain the maximum information, so let's use a
JPEG file.
Step-02: Open a Picture File
Once the selected picture opens the picture, it will load the picture into the thumbnail
to the left and display the EXIF data to the right down the page as shown below.
There are lots of information you can collect in the EXIF data, but most are related to
the technical specifications of the camera and photography. GPS coordinates of where
the picture was taken. Most of this is of limited value to the forensic investigator.
EXPERIMENT- 4
Aim of the Experiment: How to make the forensic image of the hard drive using
EnCase Forensics.
2. Introduction
In solving computer crime cases, computer forensics is used to gather evidence,
which will be analyzed and presented to a court of law to prove the illegal activity. It
is important that when doing computer forensics, no alteration, virus introduction,
damages or data corruption occurs. In order to do a good analysis, the first step is to
do a secure collection of computer evidence. Secure collection of evidence is
important to guarantee the evidential integrity and security of information. The best
approach for this matter is to use a disk imaging tool. Choosing and using the right
tool is very important in computer forensics investigation.
Disk imaging
Disk imaging as defined by Jim Bates, Technical Director of Computer Forensics
Ltd, refers to:
“An image of the whole disk was copied. This was regardless of any software on the
disk and the important point was that the complete content of the disk was copied
including the location of the data. Disk imaging takes sector-by-sector copy usually
for forensic purposes and as such it will contain some mechanism (internal
verification) to prove that the copy is exact and has not been altered. It does not
necessarily need the same geometry as the original as long as arrangements are made
to simulate the geometry if it becomes necessary to boot into the acquired image.”
Disk imaging is also one of the approaches for backup except that backup only
copies the active file. In backup, ambient data will not be copied. This is an area
where the most important source for the evidence could be found. Ambient data is a
data stored in Windows swap file, unallocated space and file slack.
Scenario: Mr. X is suspected to be involved in selling his company’s confidential
data to the competitors, but without any evidence, no action could be taken against
him. To get into reality and proof Mr. X guilty, the company has requested the
forensic services and have come to know all the relevant data is present inside the
desktop provided to him.
Since it is never advised to work with the original evidence because we may lose
some relevant data accidentally, so we will create an image of the original evidence
and work on it further. This way the original evidence is safe and the integrity and
authenticity of the evidence could be proved through hash values.
Step-01:
To image the computer hard drive, we will use Encase Imager. EnCase Imager is a
software which is bundled with numerous features which aid in all the four phases of
forensic investigation i.e. Collection, Preservation, Filtering and Report.
First, download the Encase Imager demo from here and install in your computer.
Once it is installed, Initialize the Software in Enterprise Mode.
Step 2: Click On New For Creating A New Case. Fill the labels.
Click On Finish.
Step 3: View the Case by Clicking On Case 1 <Case Name>
Step 4: Click on add local device for Adding Devices to Your Case. If there is any write
blocker attached with the machine and digital deice then tick to 1,2 and 5 option otherwise
untick to all and click on Next button.
Step 5: Tick in the box of name column which shows the connected device name
or label like (1,2,3 or any numeric number) and click on the finish button.
Step-06: Now to open evidence click on label number of the device which shows in
“name” column and again right-click on label number and choose acquire the option.
Step-07: Then a pop up will appear with three tabs. In the location tab, fills all the fields. In format
tab if you want to encrypt the evidence file then enable the Compression field otherwise disable it. In
Verification Hash field value should be chosen MD5 and SHA1 after it click on OK button. File
format selected here is E01 as this is supported by multiple tools and is suitable for further analysis.
If we want to password protect/encrypt our image we can do this at this stage.
Step-08: After it, image creation will be start and time taken to create
the image will be shown on the right side of the bottom. you can check
the status of image acquisition on the same window at the lower right
corner along with the time remaining (refer below image).
Step-09: Device will automatically disconnect after creating the image. The image will save in
the folder which we set the path earlier. Once the acquisition is complete the image will get
saved to the output folder (refer below image).
EXPERIMENT- 5
Aim: How to Restoring the Evidence Image using EnCase Imager Open Encase
Imager and add the evidence to Encase imager
Browse to the image (.E01) file and add it to the case. The evidence added will get
listed
Double click on the image, select he files to be restored and select the restore option
located under Device option.
When we click on restore, connect the drive where we want to restore the image and
click next. All the drives will be read. All the drives will be displayed, select the
drive where the image is to be restored. Use the blank drive for restoring the image
as the existing data will be wiped.
Type “Yes” in the text box and click on OK this will wipe the existing data on the
drive and start with the image restoration.
Image Restoration will start, we can check the progress on the lower right corner of
the window.
Once the restoration is complete, we can see the data in the drive we have selected.
To ensure the integrity of the data, we can see the report section on the bottom pane
and check the hash values. The hash values should be the same as of the image (we
can check the original hash value in the image report.)
If required we can copy and save the report in any text / word file for any future
reference.
EXPERIMENT- 6
Aim: How to Extracting Browser Artifacts
ChromeHistoryView: is a small utility that reads the history data file of Google
Chrome Web browser, and displays the list of all visited Web pages in the last days.
For each visited Webpage, the following information is displayed: URL, Title, Visit
Date/Time, Number of visits, number of times that the user typed this address
(Typed Count), Referrer, and Visit ID.
IECacheView: IECacheView is a small utility that reads the cache folder of Internet
Explorer, and displays the list of all files currently stored in the cache. For each
cache file, the following information is displayed: Filename, Content Type, URL,
Last Accessed Time, Last Modified Time, Expiration Time, Number of Hits, File
Size, Folder Name, and full path of the cache filename.
EXPERIMENT- 7
Aim: How to View Last Activity of Your PC
LastActivityView is a tool for Windows operating system that collects information
from various sources on a running system, and displays a log of actions made by the
user and events occurred on this computer.
EXPERIMENT- 8
Aim: Find Last Connected USB on your system (USB Forensics)
USBDeview is a small utility that lists all USB devices that currently connected to
your computer, as well as all USB devices that you previously used.
For each USB device, extended information is displayed: Device name/description,
device type, serial number (for mass storage devices), the date/time that device was
added, VendorID, ProductID, and more…
USBDeview also allows you to uninstall USB devices that you previously used,
disconnect USB devices that are currently connected to your computer, as well as to
disable and enable USB devices.
You can also use USBDeview on a remote computer, as long as you log in to that
computer with admin user.