Impressions: Digital Forensics with Open Source Tools

For my fourth impressions post, I'll turn to the digital forensics world for Digital Forensics with Open Source Tools (DFWOST) by Cory Altheide and Harlan Carvey. I took a lot of notes but didn't read closely enough in my opinion to merit a full review.

I didn't like the way this book started. I can't tell if the authors expect the reader to be familiar with open source software or not. The book needed to start in chapter 2 with something like "let's start by selecting Ubuntu for our operating system. We like it for the following reasons..." In contrast, the reader suddenly finds himself in the "Working with Images" section trying to use losetup, mmls, doing math, etc. That's too fast! Many reading this book are going to get lost on page 23 between "sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev libexpat1-dev" and advice to use "a simple ./configure..."

Beyond the rough start, however, I thought the rest of the book was interesting. I liked reading about a variety of tools, especially trying to accomplish the same task on Linux and Windows. I enjoyed reading about hidden Windows Event Logs in ch 4 and about hachoir in ch 8. The book made great use of public evidence sources, like the Digital Corpora.

Near the end of the book (ch 9) I read a reference to Rob Lee's SIFT platform, so I wondered by the book didn't use it throughout? I also would have liked to have read more about log2timeline in ch 9.

One note for a second edition: some figures in the book feature resolutions so high that the text is not legible given the size of the screen captures.

I think you will like DFWOST, but I bet the second edition will be stronger.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more