Forensic Discovery

by Dan Farmer, Wietse Venema, Wietse Venema

Don't look now, but your fingerprints are all over the cover of this book. Simply picking it up off the shelf to read the cover has left a trail of evidence that you were here. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 020163497X
• ISBN13: 9780201634976
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
• Length: 217 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.2" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Forensic Discovery is a great resource

I read forensic discovery last week on the plane home from San Francisco. After a few chapters I was hooked and could barely put it down to eat. This book is absolutely recommended for anyone at all interested in security concepts as well as system administrators or anyone who would need to understand the way that information exists and persists on computer systems.

Superb forensics book on evidence discovery

I enjoyed the book ("Forensic Discovery") since it came when I was preparing for my SANS forensics certification (GCFA). Obviously, the "household" names on the cover caught my attention as well. I used TCT and other tools created by the authors and thus my expectations for the book were pretty high. It did deliver! I picked up a whole lot of tidbits on file system forensics as well as malware and compromised system investigation. Unlike some other volumes, this book does not seek to be comprehensive; instead, it focuses on the fun things and focuses on them well. In particular, I liked authors' ideas and tips on the OOV (order of volatility) of evidence. While not new, they are extremely well-presented in the book. Other highly useful sections were the ones on time stamps and their analysis and file deletion analysis (with thorough persistence of deleted file analysis). I did not like the sections on malware analysis that much, likely because some other book go way more in-depth then this one (like, for example recent Szor's book on viruses). The book mostly covers Unix, Windows is also mentioned a couple of times. Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH, GCFA is a Security Strategist with a major security company. He is an author of the book "Security Warrior" and a contributor to "Know Your Enemy II". In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org

Great Information from Two Network Security Legends

I have learned a lot from other computer forensics books such as Harlan Carvey's Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery or Kevin Mandia and Chris Prosise's Incident Response and Computer Forensics - 2nd Edition, but this one has a slightly different approach and conveys a lot of good, detailed information in a relatively concise book. The book is aimed at readers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of how computer systems work, particularly system administrators or those who may actually be tasked with performing a forensic investigation. The book does assume some level of computer knowledge such as the basic concepts of networking, system processes or file systems and is not intended for pure novices. Farmer and Venema focus a fair amount of attention on the concept of time and how to use it in a forensic investigation. They also highlight a sort of order of operations for how to proceed to try and ensure you retrieve volatile data before it disappears. Computer forensics is an area of network and computer security that I am particularly interested in. This is an excellent book which I highly recommend. It is well-written and very educational, but it is also a fairly quick read. [...]

Small on size, but big on detail

This book is small, but it is packed with information. The book is easy to read. I learned a thing or two myself about UNIX filesystems regarding forensics. Every serious security practioner should read this book.

One of the best security books published in the last year

When most people think of forensics, television shows like Quincy and CSI come to mind. Where such shows deviate from reality is the unrealistic speed at which the actors are able to identify, apprehend and prosecute the perpetrators. In the real world, (unlike television, where the crime must be solved by the end of the family hour), crimes are solved with slow, deliberate and methodical steps. The prodigious incidence of digital crime has elevated computer forensics to a critical role within the field of information security. The focus of computer forensics is twofold: first is the attempt to determine whether a breach has occurred and to stop the perpetrator; second is prosecution of the offender, if the breach was a criminal activity. Security luminaries Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema wrote one of the first vulnerability scanners (SATAN) almost 10 years ago; SATAN was the precursor to ISS Scanner, Retina and nmap. Venema wrote such well-known security applications as the TCP Wrapper program and the Postfix mail server. Farmer and Venema's new book Forensic Discovery is a valuable book that grounds a computer-savvy reader in the world of digital forensics. An image of a pipe by artist René Magritte is on the cover with the caption Ceci nest pas une pipe. ("This is not a Pipe.") The picture demonstrates that an object exists on many planes; the simple recognition of the picture initiates the belief that we are seeing something, but it is only known in representation. Surrealist painting and digital forensics coalesce in that the digital forensic investigator must think broadly and unconventionally in order to reconstruct an incident, all the time keeping in mind that often what initially seems obvious is neither real nor correct. The material in the book is an outgrowth of a one-time seminar the authors gave in 1999 on digital forensics and analysis. At the seminar, Farmer and Venema rolled out The Coroner's Toolkit (TCT), a collection of tools for gathering and analyzing forensic data on a Unix system. TCT is heavily referenced throughout the book. The book initially seems thin, at just 198 pages, but there is no filler and the information is presented in a fast and furious manner. Part one of the book comprises 35 pages and is an introduction to the foundations of digital forensics and what to look for in an digital investigation. Part two (chapters 3-6) is the nucleus of the book, which quickly gets into low-level details about file systems and operating system environments. While other forensics books focus exclusively on the discovery and gathering of data; Forensic Discovery adds needed insight on how to judge the trustworthiness of the observation and the data itself. Again, the idea is that not everything is as obvious as it may initially seem. An effective investigation often requires intense analysis, where meaningful conclusions take time. Chapter 4, "File System Analysis," notes that while computers have significantly evolved si