Review of Forensic Discovery Posted

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of Forensic Discovery. I read a pre-publication draft of the book which resulted in my quote on the Addison-Wesley site. From the review:

"Farmer and Venema do for digital archaeology what Indiana Jones did for historical archaeology. 'Forensic Discovery' unearths hidden treasures in enlightening and entertaining ways, showing how a time-centric approach to computer forensics reveals even the cleverest intruder. I highly recommend reading this book."

In the chapter 7 (available online as a .pdf) Farmer and Venema mention the Veeco Nanotheater. Veeco makes products which can scan the surface of disks at nanotechnology scales. They show the image at right, and describe it as "residuals of overwritten information on the sides of magnetic disk tracks." This demonstrates the difficulty of truly "destroying" digital evidence. Forensic Discovery explains the problem this way:

"Although memory chips and magnetic disks are designed to store digital information, the underlying technology is analog. With analog storage of digital information, the value of a bit is a complex combination of past stored values. Memory chips have undocumented diagnostic modes that allow access to values smaller than a bit. With modified electronic circuitry, signals from disk read heads can reveal older data as modulations on the analog signal."

At 198 pages this book is a quick read, which explains how I was able to read and review it while writing a new book!

Comments

Anonymous said…
I was mulling over whether or not to pick this one up, being skeptical of many of the newer "forensics" texts. Your review made me order the book!

FYI, another great forensics book for intrusion-related incidents is the Hacker's Challenge series from Mike Schiffman. They read like those Solve-Your-Own-Mystery stories that I loved as a kid. The cases are based on real-world intrusions and the reader is given everything from Exchange logs to physical security system data. Its the closest thing to analyzing a real incident that I've been able to find in a bookstore, and I think these types of books are a great supplement to traditional forensics texts like Kruse's or Vacca's
12:20 PM
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 technica...
Read more