Comparison of open source versus industry standard computer forensic tools

Using a video camera, you can repeatedly visit a crime scene to look for that single clue you missed. Simply recording your thoughts is often best accomplished using a simple digital recorder that essentially acts as your personal note-taker!

You can find digital video cameras and audio recorders in any good retail electronics store, such as Best Buy or Radio Shack, and Internet retailers. The basic models now available are more than enough to document all your case needs, as long as you carry extra batteries and data storage capacity.

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Computer Forensic Software Tools The days of hard-core computer geeks knowing every square digital inch of an operating system are years behind us. Just remember that a tool is only as good as the person who uses it. EnCase EnCase , the gold standard is used by countless organizations for almost any computer forensic investigation.

Two other cool features are its: Scripting language: You can customize searches. Fully automated report function: It builds reports for you quickly. Logicube Logicube offers some of the fastest disk-to-disk and disk-to-image transfer equipment now on the market. Computer Forensic Laboratories Every good computer forensic scientist or investigator needs a place to do their work.

Computer forensic data server Any computer forensic investigative unit of any size rapidly runs into where to store cases in progress or that need to be archived for possible later use. Forensic write blockers One basic piece of equipment that a computer forensic laboratory needs are simple but effective write blocker. For reliability and support, stick with these name brands in the industry: Digital Intelligence: The UltraKit write-block product see www. Besides, the cables and power supplies are furnished, to make this kit one of the most complete in the industry.

Paraben: Paraben has taken the idea of a Faraday box and added silver-lined gloves to allow an investigator to work on a wireless device located inside the box. The Wireless Stronghold Box see www. This box, a Faraday cage, isolates any enclosed wireless device, making it a wireless write blocker. For added protection, all connections leading into the box are filtered. Wiebetech products see www. Founded in , CyberSecurityMag is an award-winning online publication for small business owners, entrepreneurs and the people who are interested in cyber security.

It is one of the most popular independent small business publications on the web. Reuben Launelez June 24, at am. Digital Forensics Framework. Equipped with a graphical user interface for simple use and automation, DFF guides a user through the critical steps of a digital investigation and can be used by both professionals and amateurs alike.

The tool can be used to investigate hard drives and volatile memory and create reports about system and user activity on the device in question. The DFF was developed with the three main goals of modularity allowing for changes to the software by developers , scriptability allowing for automation , and genericity keeping the operating-system agnostic to help as many users as possible.

The software is available for free on GitHub. DumpZilla performs browser analysis, specifically of Firefox, Iceweasel, and Seamonkey clients. It allows for the visualization and customized search and extraction of cookies, downloads, history, bookmarks, cache, add-ons, saved passwords, and session data. While this was created as a standalone tool, its specific nature and lean packaging make it a strong component of future digital forensics suites.

Since , EnCase has offered forensic software to help professionals find evidence to testify in criminal investigation cases involving cybersecurity breaches by recovering evidence and analyzing files on hard drives and mobile phones.

Offering a comprehensive software lifecycle package from triage to final reports, EnCase also features platforms such as OpenText Media Analyzer which reduces the amount of content for investigators to manually review to close cases faster. With four site license options for small companies; federal, state, and local law enforcement; consulting organizations; and colleges and universities, offers criminal justice evidence analysis through just a few clicks.

ExifTool is a platform-independent system for reading, writing, and editing metadata across a wide range of file types. Of particular interest to the digital investigator is the reading of metadata, which can be achieved through command-line processes or a simple GUI. Investigators can drag and drop different files, such as a PDF, or a JPEG, and learn when and where the file was created—a crucial component in establishing a chain of evidence.

The software itself is lightweight and quick, making it an ideal inclusion in future digital forensics suites, and easy to use. FTK Imager. In order for tools such as The Sleuth Kit by Autopsy to work properly, original digital copies of hard drives must be preserved before evidence can be extracted.

Enter FTK Imager; a free tool that analyzes images of a drive and preserves the original integrity of the evidence without affecting its original state. This tool can read all operating systems and enables users to recover files that have been deleted from digital recycle bins.

It can parse XFS files and create hashes of files to check data integrity. Using a small memory footprint, digital forensic investigators can use the tool and minimize the amount of memory data that is overwritten. This tool can export raw memory data in raw formats. This free tool supports several versions of Windows operating systems. Initially a product of Mandiant, but later taken over by FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, Redline is a freeware tool that provides endpoint security and investigative capabilities to its users.

It is mainly used to perform memory analysis and look for signs of infection or malicious activity, but it can also be used to collect and correlate data around event logs, the registry, running processes, file system metadata, web history, and network activity.

Offering much more technical and under-the-hood capability than most digital forensics investigations necessitate, Redline has more applications in cybersecurity and other tech-driven criminal behavior where a granular analysis is critical.

Redline currently only functions on Windows-based systems, but it is regularly updated by FireEye for optimum performance and can be downloaded for free on the FireEye website. SIFT Workstation. The toolkit can securely examine raw disks and multiple file formats and does so in a secure, read-only manner that does not alter the evidence it discovers. SIFT is available for free and updated regularly. The Volatility Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the use of memory analysis within the forensics community.

Its primary software is an open-source framework for incident response and malware detection through volatile memory RAM forensics. This allows the preservation of evidence in memory that would otherwise be lost during a system shutdown. It organizes information in a different way than Wireshark and automatically extracts certain types of files from a traffic capture. Xplico is an open-source network forensic analysis tool.

It is used to extract useful data from applications which use Internet and network protocols. It also supports both IPv4 and IPv6. Read more about this tool here. Mobile devices are becoming the main method by which many people access the internet. Some mobile forensics tools have a special focus on mobile device analysis. Oxygen Forensic Detective focuses on mobile devices but is capable of extracting data from a number of different platforms, including mobile, IoT, cloud services, drones, media cards, backups and desktop platforms.

It uses physical methods to bypass device security such as screen lock and collects authentication data for a number of different mobile applications. Oxygen is a commercial product distributed as a USB dongle. More information here. Cellebrite offers a number of commercial digital forensics tools, but its Cellebrite UFED claims to be the industry standard for accessing digital data.

The UFED platform claims to use exclusive methods to maximize data extraction from mobile devices. XRY is a collection of different commercial tools for mobile device forensics. XRY Logical is a suite of tools designed to interface with the mobile device operating system and extract the desired data.

XRY Physical, on the other hand, uses physical recovery techniques to bypass the operating system, enabling analysis of locked devices. Read more about XRY here. Many of the tools described here are free and open-source.

Several Linux distributions have been created that aggregate these free tools to provide an all-in-one toolkit for forensics investigators. It offers an environment to integrate existing software tools as software modules in a user-friendly manner. This tool is open-source.

SIFT is another open-source Linux virtual machine that aggregates free digital forensics tools. This platform was developed by the SANS Institute and its use is taught in a number of their courses. It comes with many open-source digital forensics tools, including hex editors, data carving and password-cracking tools. If you want the free version, you can go for Helix3 R1. After this release, this project was taken over by a commercial vendor. So, you need to pay for the most recent version of the tool.

This tool can collect data from physical memory, network connections, user accounts, executing processes and services, scheduled jobs, Windows Registry, chat logs, screen captures, SAM files, applications, drivers, environment variables and internet history. Then it analyzes and reviews the data to generate the compiled results based on reports. Helix3 R1 can be downloaded here. The enterprise version is available here. Digital forensics is a specialization that is in constant demand.

As the number of cyberattacks and data breaches grow and regulatory requirements become stricter, organizations require the ability to determine the scope and impact of a potential incident. The tools included in this list are some of the more popular tools and platforms used for forensic analysis.

In many cases, these tools have similar functionality, so the choice between them mainly depends on cost and personal preference. Additionally, a wide variety of other tools are available as well. A good starting point for trying out digital forensics tools is exploring one of the Linux platforms mentioned at the end of this article. These platforms have a range of free tools installed and configured, making it possible to try out the various options without a significant investment of licensing fees or setup time.

A new tab for your requested boot camp pricing will open in 5 seconds. If it doesn't open, click here. Howard Poston is a cybersecurity researcher with a background in blockchain, cryptography and malware analysis. He has a master's degree in Cyber Operations from the Air Force Institute of Technology and two years of experience in cybersecurity research and development at Sandia National Labs.

He currently works as a freelance consultant providing training and content creation for cyber and blockchain security. I think Kali Linux has a variety of tools for Digital forensics and it comes free..