Blog: Author - Chad Tilbury

The GUI control panel is a long standing feature of Microsoft Windows, facilitating granular changes to a vast collection of system features. It can be disabled via Group Policy but is largely available to most user accounts (administrative permissions are required for some changes). From a forensic perspective, we can audit control panel usage to identify a wide range of user activity:

• Firewall changes made for unauthorized software (firewall.cpl)


• User account additions / modifications (nusrmgr.cpl)


• Turning off System Restore / Volume Shadow Copies (sysdm.cpl)


• System time changes (timedate.cpl)


• Interaction with third-party security software applets

While identifying individual system modifications is difficult, at a minimum we can show that a user accessed a specific control panel applet at a specific time. Context provided by other artifacts may provide further information. As ...

Last year I covered the free Encrypted Disk Detector (EDD) tool and challenged the community to help crowdsource its development [link]. Thank you to all that took part in the experiment. Magnet Forensics announced today that Encrypted Disk Detector version 2 is available [get it here].

Survey Results

In addition to encouraging additional development of EDD, a side benefit of the project was to get an idea of the most popular disk encryption products being deployed. Figure 1 provides the survey results, with Checkpoint Full Disk Encryption, Symantec Endpoint Encryption, and Sophos (formerly Utimaco) Safeguard rounding out the top three. I think many of us could ...

Like many great inventions, the idea behind F-Response is so simple and elegant it is hard not to punish yourself for not thinking of it. Using the iSCSI protocol to provide read-only mounting of remote devices opens up a wealth of options for those of us working in geographically dispersed environments. I have used it for everything from remote imaging to fast forensic triage to live memory analysis. F-Response is vendor-neutral and tool independent, essentially opening up a network pipe to remote devices and allowing the freedom of using nearly any tool in your kit. The product is so good, I really wouldn't blame them for just sitting back and counting their money. Luckily, counting money gets boring fast, so instead the folks at F-Response have kept innovating and adding value. Their latest additions are new "Connector" tools: Database, Cloud, and Email.

Now is the time to start planning how to acquire forensic copies of all that data your organization is pushing

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Device acquisition may not be the sexiest phase of digital forensics, but it has the most number of pitfalls and can result in catastrophic loss. If a practitioner makes a mistake during acquisition, the investigation may simply be over, with nothing left to examine. Establishing an acquisition process is important, and a critical part of your process should be checking for the presence of full disk and volume-based encryption. Disk encryption is more prevalent than many believe -- I am anecdotally seeing it in use on nearly thirty percent of the computers I encounter. If a system is running, the examiner often has a one-time shot to capture any mounted volumes in their decrypted state.

The inherent challenge is how to determine if an encrypted disk or volume exists. From the perspective of the operating system, data on a mounted volume is available in unencrypted form. A separate abstraction layer takes care of encrypting write operations and decrypting data for read

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I recently wrote on my personal blog about some of the new updates to the SANS Forensics 508 course and included a link to a new memory forensics cheat sheet. By popular request, I am posting a PDF versionof the cheat sheet here on the SANS blog. Feedback is appreciated!

Chad Tilbury, GCFA, has spent over twelve ...