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An interesting speculative post on the forensics techniques that would most likely be used by the FBI during the investigation of the recovered Veteran’s Administration laptop.
Most of them are pretty straight forwards if you have any kind of experience with digital forensics and data recovery (disaster recovery, incident response etc.)
As a former Computer Forensic Specialist, I wanted to explain what’s probably going on with this laptop now that the FBI has the system and is forensically examining it. This explanation assumes the data was present on the hard drive (not a CD-Rom or other storage medium).
The two main areas cover physical examination and digital examination, physical would be looking for fingerprints and looking for evidence of tampering (screw heads, case scratches etc.).
A little discussion on MAC times and so on, if anyone is interested in this area, I might elaborate later.
As I said in the previous article, there isn’t much they can do if someone knew what they were doing.
The laptop thieves really know what they are doing. They remove the hard drive from the laptop, and mount it read-only (no modifications to the file system) on another computer, access the sensitive data and re-insert the hard drive into the stolen laptop. This is the same process the forensic examiner would use to prevent the examination from modifying the data contained on the laptop — and this is why I mentioned what the FBI might look for during the physical examination — marks on the screws or finger prints on the internal hard drive casing.
Indeed.
Source: Zonelabs
Pedro Pinheiro says
What kind of traces would booting with a linux live CD leave…? As I understand (unless you delete/change files) when such live CDs mount an existing partition, they don’t write anything on it. Am I wrong?
Darknet says
Pedro: You are right to a degree, it depends on the level of detail you go to. The thing is many of the modern bootable CD’s mount any FAT32/NTFS partitions they find read/write which would leave last accessed information for any files you copied off. Also there is informations stored on the IDE channels, last accessed, last booted etc.
bj says
well; the real thing to do (if you were the bad guy) is to do a raw copy of the entire drive (dd / logicube) of the hard drive, then to do all your analysis on that….. that way you dont leave traces on the original drive (and not on the hardware if u use logicube or something equivalent).
Pedro Pinheiro says
And would it be possible to design a live CD that wouldn’t leave ANY traces? Such as reading first the IDE info and reflashing afterwards, and not writing anything on the disk? It would be an interesting alternative to opening the laptop to remove the disk (impossible not to leave any traces, imagine doing it on an iBook!).
Joe says
usually they copy the hddd contents over and play with thise ones as the originals are evidnece in court. all processes are logged so that any results are re obtainalbe from another copy.