One of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry for the past few years, virtualization has matured into a practical requirement for many best-practice business scenarios, becoming an invaluable tool for security professionals at companies of every size. In addition to saving time and other resources, virtualization affords unprecedented means for intrusion and malware detection, prevention, recovery, and analysis. Taking a practical approach in a growing market underserved by books, this hands-on title is the first to combine in one place the most important and sought-after uses of virtualization for enhanced security, including sandboxing, disaster recovery and high availability, forensic analysis, and honeypotting.Already gaining buzz and traction in actual usage at an impressive rate, Gartner research indicates that virtualization will be the most significant trend in IT infrastructure and operations over the next four years. A recent report by IT research firm IDC predicts the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011. With this growth in adoption, becoming increasingly common even for small and midsize businesses, security is becoming a much more serious concern, both in terms of how to secure virtualization and how virtualization can serve critical security objectives. Titles exist and are on the way to fill the need for securing virtualization, but security professionals do not yet have a book outlining the many security applications of virtualization that will become increasingly important in their job requirements. This book is the first to fill that need, covering tactics such as isolating a virtual environment on the desktop for application testing, creating virtualized storage solutions for immediate disaster recovery and high availability across a network, migrating physical systems to virtual systems for analysis, and creating complete virtual systems to entice hackers and expose potential threats to actual production systems.About the TechnologiesA sandbox is an isolated environment created to run and test applications that might be a security risk. Recovering a compromised system is as easy as restarting the virtual machine to revert to the point before failure. Employing virtualization on actual production systems, rather than just test environments, yields similar benefits for disaster recovery and high availability. While traditional disaster recovery methods require time-consuming reinstallation of the operating system and applications before restoring data, backing up to a virtual machine makes the recovery process much easier, faster, and efficient. The virtual machine can be restored to same physical machine or an entirely different machine if the original machine has experienced irreparable hardware failure. Decreased downtime translates into higher availability of the system and increased productivity in the enterprise.Virtualization has been used for years in the field of forensic analysis, but new tools, techniques, and automation capabilities are making it an increasingly important tool. By means of virtualization, an investigator can create an exact working copy of a physical computer on another machine, including hidden or encrypted partitions, without altering any data, allowing complete access for analysis. The investigator can also take a live ?snapshot? to review or freeze the target computer at any point in time, before an attacker has a chance to cover his tracks or inflict further damage.

Virtualization and Forensics: A Digital Forensic Investigators Guide to Virtual Environments offers an in-depth view into the world of virtualized environments and the implications they have on forensic investigations. Named a 2011 Best Digital Forensics Book by InfoSec Reviews, this guide gives you the end-to-end knowledge needed to identify server, desktop, and portable virtual environments, including: VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, and Sun. It covers technological advances in virtualization tools, methods, and issues in digital forensic investigations, and explores trends and emerging technologies surrounding virtualization technology. This book consists of three parts. Part I explains the process of virtualization and the different types of virtualized environments. Part II details how virtualization interacts with the basic forensic process, describing the methods used to find virtualization artifacts in dead and live environments as well as identifying the virtual activities that affect the examination process. Part III addresses advanced virtualization issues, such as the challenges of virtualized environments, cloud computing, and the future of virtualization. This book will be a valuable resource for forensic investigators (corporate and law enforcement) and incident response professionals. - Named a 2011 Best Digital Forensics Book by InfoSec Reviews - Gives you the end-to-end knowledge needed to identify server, desktop, and portable virtual environments, including: VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, and Sun - Covers technological advances in virtualization tools, methods, and issues in digital forensic investigations - Explores trends and emerging technologies surrounding virtualization technology

To reduce the risk of digital forensic evidence being called into question in judicial proceedings, it is important to have a rigorous methodology and set of procedures for conducting digital forensic investigations and examinations. Digital forensic investigation in the cloud computing environment, however, is in infancy due to the comparatively recent prevalence of cloud computing. Cloud Storage Forensics presents the first evidence-based cloud forensic framework. Using three popular cloud storage services and one private cloud storage service as case studies, the authors show you how their framework can be used to undertake research into the data remnants on both cloud storage servers and client devices when a user undertakes a variety of methods to store, upload, and access data in the cloud. By determining the data remnants on client devices, you gain a better understanding of the types of terrestrial artifacts that are likely to remain at the Identification stage of an investigation. Once it is determined that a cloud storage service account has potential evidence of relevance to an investigation, you can communicate this to legal liaison points within service providers to enable them to respond and secure evidence in a timely manner. - Learn to use the methodology and tools from the first evidenced-based cloud forensic framework - Case studies provide detailed tools for analysis of cloud storage devices using popular cloud storage services - Includes coverage of the legal implications of cloud storage forensic investigations - Discussion of the future evolution of cloud storage and its impact on digital forensics

Virtualization and Forensics: A Digital Forensic Investigators Guide to Virtual Environments provides an introduction to virtualized environments and their implications on forensic investigations. It emphasizes the need for organizations using virtualization to be proactive rather than reactive. Being proactive means learning the methods in this book to train staff, so when an incident occurs, they can quickly perform the forensics and minimize the damage to their systems. The book is organized into three parts. Part I deals with the virtualization process and the different types of virtualized environments. It explains how virtualization happens along with the various methods of virtualization, hypervisors, and the main categories of virtualization. It discusses server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and the various portable virtualization programs, emulators, and appliances. Part II details how virtualization interacts with the basic forensic process. It describes the methods used to find virtualization artifacts in dead and live environments, and identifies the virtual activities that affect the examination process. Part III addresses advanced virtualization issues, such as the challenges of virtualized environments, cloud computing, and the future of virtualization. Named a 2011 Best Digital Forensics Book by InfoSec Reviews Gives you the end-to-end knowledge needed to identify server, desktop, and portable virtual environments, including: VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, and Sun Covers technological advances in virtualization tools, methods, and issues in digital forensic investigations Explores trends and emerging technologies surrounding virtualization technology

Digital forensics deals with the acquisition, preservation, examination, analysis and presentation of electronic evidence. Networked computing, wireless communications and portable electronic devices have expanded the role of digital forensics beyond traditional computer crime investigations. Practically every crime now involves some aspect of digital evidence; digital forensics provides the techniques and tools to articulate this evidence. Digital forensics also has myriad intelligence applications. Furthermore, it has a vital role in information assurance - investigations of security breaches yield valuable information that can be used to design more secure systems. Advances in Digital Forensics V describes original research results and innovative applications in the discipline of digital forensics. In addition, it highlights some of the major technical and legal issues related to digital evidence and electronic crime investigations. The areas of coverage include: themes and issues, forensic techniques, integrity and privacy, network forensics, forensic computing, investigative techniques, legal issues and evidence management. This book is the fifth volume in the annual series produced by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 11.9 on Digital Forensics, an international community of scientists, engineers and practitioners dedicated to advancing the state of the art of research and practice in digital forensics. The book contains a selection of twenty-three edited papers from the Fifth Annual IFIP WG 11.9 International Conference on Digital Forensics, held at the National Center for Forensic Science, Orlando, Florida, USA in the spring of 2009. Advances in Digital Forensics V is an important resource for researchers, faculty members and graduate students, as well as for practitioners and individuals engaged in research and development efforts for the law enforcement and intelligence communities.

Memory forensics provides cutting edge technology to help investigate digital attacks Memory forensics is the art of analyzing computer memory (RAM) to solve digital crimes. As a follow-up to the best seller Malware Analyst's Cookbook, experts in the fields of malware, security, and digital forensics bring you a step-by-step guide to memory forensics—now the most sought after skill in the digital forensics and incident response fields. Beginning with introductory concepts and moving toward the advanced, The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory is based on a five day training course that the authors have presented to hundreds of students. It is the only book on the market that focuses exclusively on memory forensics and how to deploy such techniques properly. Discover memory forensics techniques: How volatile memory analysis improves digital investigations Proper investigative steps for detecting stealth malware and advanced threats How to use free, open source tools for conducting thorough memory forensics Ways to acquire memory from suspect systems in a forensically sound manner The next era of malware and security breaches are more sophisticated and targeted, and the volatile memory of a computer is often overlooked or destroyed as part of the incident response process. The Art of Memory Forensics explains the latest technological innovations in digital forensics to help bridge this gap. It covers the most popular and recently released versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac, including both the 32 and 64-bit editions.

"This book presents a collection of research and case studies of applications for investigation processes in cloud computing environments, offering perspectives of cloud customers, security architects as well as law enforcement agencies on the new area of cloud forensics"--

Master the art of digital forensics and analysis with Python About This Book Learn to perform forensic analysis and investigations with the help of Python, and gain an advanced understanding of the various Python libraries and frameworks Analyze Python scripts to extract metadata and investigate forensic artifacts The writers, Dr. Michael Spreitzenbarth and Dr. Johann Uhrmann, have used their experience to craft this hands-on guide to using Python for forensic analysis and investigations Who This Book Is For If you are a network security professional or forensics analyst who wants to gain a deeper understanding of performing forensic analysis with Python, then this book is for you. Some Python experience would be helpful. What You Will Learn Explore the forensic analysis of different platforms such as Windows, Android, and vSphere Semi-automatically reconstruct major parts of the system activity and time-line Leverage Python ctypes for protocol decoding Examine artifacts from mobile, Skype, and browsers Discover how to utilize Python to improve the focus of your analysis Investigate in volatile memory with the help of volatility on the Android and Linux platforms In Detail Digital forensic analysis is the process of examining and extracting data digitally and examining it. Python has the combination of power, expressiveness, and ease of use that makes it an essential complementary tool to the traditional, off-the-shelf digital forensic tools. This book will teach you how to perform forensic analysis and investigations by exploring the capabilities of various Python libraries. The book starts by explaining the building blocks of the Python programming language, especially ctypes in-depth, along with how to automate typical tasks in file system analysis, common correlation tasks to discover anomalies, as well as templates for investigations. Next, we'll show you cryptographic algorithms that can be used during forensic investigations to check for known files or to compare suspicious files with online services such as VirusTotal or Mobile-Sandbox. Moving on, you'll learn how to sniff on the network, generate and analyze network flows, and perform log correlation with the help of Python scripts and tools. You'll get to know about the concepts of virtualization and how virtualization influences IT forensics, and you'll discover how to perform forensic analysis of a jailbroken/rooted mobile device that is based on iOS or Android. Finally, the book teaches you how to analyze volatile memory and search for known malware samples based on YARA rules. Style and approach This easy-to-follow guide will demonstrate forensic analysis techniques by showing you how to solve real-word-scenarios step by step.

An authoritative guide to investigating high-technology crimes Internet crime is seemingly ever on the rise, making the need for a comprehensive resource on how to investigate these crimes even more dire. This professional-level book--aimed at law enforcement personnel, prosecutors, and corporate investigators--provides you with the training you need in order to acquire the sophisticated skills and software solutions to stay one step ahead of computer criminals. Specifies the techniques needed to investigate, analyze, and document a criminal act on a Windows computer or network Places a special emphasis on how to thoroughly investigate criminal activity and now just perform the initial response Walks you through ways to present technically complicated material in simple terms that will hold up in court Features content fully updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Covers the emerging field of Windows Mobile forensics Also included is a classroom support package to ensure academic adoption, Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation, 2nd Edition offers help for investigating high-technology crimes.

Operating System Forensics is the first book to cover all three critical operating systems for digital forensic investigations in one comprehensive reference. Users will learn how to conduct successful digital forensic examinations in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, the methodologies used, key technical concepts, and the tools needed to perform examinations. Mobile operating systems such as Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry are also covered, providing everything practitioners need to conduct a forensic investigation of the most commonly used operating systems, including technical details of how each operating system works and how to find artifacts. This book walks you through the critical components of investigation and operating system functionality, including file systems, data recovery, memory forensics, system configuration, Internet access, cloud computing, tracking artifacts, executable layouts, malware, and log files. You'll find coverage of key technical topics like Windows Registry, /etc directory, Web browers caches, Mbox, PST files, GPS data, ELF, and more. Hands-on exercises in each chapter drive home the concepts covered in the book. You'll get everything you need for a successful forensics examination, including incident response tactics and legal requirements. Operating System Forensics is the only place you'll find all this covered in one book. - Covers digital forensic investigations of the three major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS - Presents the technical details of each operating system, allowing users to find artifacts that might be missed using automated tools - Hands-on exercises drive home key concepts covered in the book. - Includes discussions of cloud, Internet, and major mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS