Top 5 Most Popular and Best Cyber Forensics Tools | -CyberLuC

Top 5 Most Popular and Best Cyber Forensics Tools

The art of Cyber forensic investigation is quite complex and requires rigorous precision in following every investigative step from Acquisition to Analysis & Reporting. Experts now face the need for dependable tools that help them to do so, from the beginning. Every investigation requires usage of multiple tools, dependence on a sole tool causes the investigation to lose its flexibility and makes it prone towards ambiguity.  

Cyber forensic: As the title says, it is collecting evidence for investigation after an unwanted activity has occurred. Cyber/Computer Forensics is a department that comes under Digital Forensic Science for improving cyber security

Here are top 5 cyber forensic tools preferred by specialists and investigators around the world.

So what are the tools used by these professionals? Here’s a list of top 5 tools  used with a brief description and key features.

#1)Pro Discover Forensic

Pro Discover  Forensics is a powerful computer security tool that enables computer professionals to find all the data on a computer disk while protecting evidence and creating evidentiary quality reports for use in legal proceedings.

ProDiscover Forensic is that Computer/Cybersecurity tool which can enable the professionals to locate all the data from a particular computer storage disk and also simultaneously protects the evidence and creates the documentation report used for legal orders.

Hardware Protection for the data in any system or organization is a very important thing and also equally tough for anyone to break through it. ProDiscover Forensic reads the disk at the sector level and hence you can say that no data can be hidden from this tool.

This tool has the ability to recover any deleted files from the victim system and examine the slack space. It can access Windows Alternate Data Streams and allows you to have a preview and search or capture the process (i.e. take a screenshot or any other means) of the Hardware Protected Area (HPA). ProDiscover Forensic uses its own technology to conduct this exercise.

Key Features Of ProDiscover Forensic Would Be

1.     Search files or an entire disk, including slack space, HPA section, and Windows NT/2000/XP Alternate Data Streams for complete disk forensic analysis.

2.     Examine and cross-reference data at the file or cluster level to ensure nothing is hidden, even in slack space.

3.     Utilize Perl scripts to automate investigation tasks.

4.     Preview all files, even if hidden or deleted, without altering data on disk, including file Metadata.

5.     Create a Bit-Stream copy of the disk to be analyzed, including hidden HPA section (patent pending), to keep original evidence safe.

#2)Sleuth Kit (+Autopsy)

The Sleuth Kit (+Autopsy) A Command Line Interface Is A Mode Of Interacting With A Computer Program. Here The Users/Clients Issue Commands To The Program Successive Lines Of Text Known As Commands In A Programming Language.                                              

Similarly Sleuth Kit Is A Collection Of Such Command Line Interfaces/Tools. It Allows The User To Examine The Disk Images Os The Victim Device And Recover The Damaged Files. It Is Generally Used In Autopsy Along With Many Other Open Source Or Commercial Forensic Tools.

Autopsy Feature List

1.     LNK File Analysis: Identifies shortcuts and accessed documents

2.     Email Analysis: Parses MBOX format messages, such as Thunderbird.

3.     EXIF: Extracts geolocation and camera information from JPEG files.

4.     File Type Sorting: Group files by their type to find all images or documents.

5.     Media Playback: View videos and images in the application and not require an external viewer.

6.     Multi-User Cases: Collaborate with fellow examiners on larger cases.

7.     Timeline Analysis: Displays system events in a graphical interface to help identify activity.

8.     Keyword Search: Text extraction and index searched modules enable you to find files that mention specific terms and find regular expression patterns.

9.     Web Artifacts: Extracts web activity from common browsers to help identify user activity.

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#3) X-Ways Forensics

X-Ways Forensics is an advanced platform for digital forensics examiners. It runs on all available version of Windows. One of the problems faced by the professional while using any Forensic toolkit is that they are resource-hungry, slow, incapable of reaching all nook and corners. Whereas X-Ways Forensics is not resource-hungry, faster, finds all the deleted files and comes with additional features. This forensic tool is user-friendly and fully-portable and can be carried on a USB stick. It doesn’t require any extra installation on Windows systems.

Key features of X-ray forensic include

1.     Complete access to disks, RAIDs, and images more than 2 TB in size

2.     Automatic identification of lost/deleted partitions

3.     Viewing and editing binary data structures using templates

4.     Recursive view of all existing and deleted files in all sub directories

5.     Disk cloning and imaging

6.     Ability to read partitioning and file system structures inside raw (.dd) image files, ISO, VHD and VMDK images

#4)SIFT- SANS Investigative Forensic Toolkit

SIFT has the ability to examine raw disks (i.e. the data in byte level secured directly from the hard disk drive or any other storage devices), multiple file systems and evidence formats. It is basically based on Ubuntu and is a Live CD including the tools one needs to conduct an in-depth forensic investigation or response investigation. The best thing about the SIFT toolkit is that it’s Free and Open Source.                                                                                                                                     

SIFT can match any modern day incident-response and forensic tool suite which is also featured in SANS Advanced Incident Response course. So what sort of evidence formats does SIFT support? It supports anything ranging from Advanced Forensic Format (AFF) to RAW (dd) evidence formats and even more.                                                                                                                                           

Key Features Of SIFT Would Be

1.     Ubuntu LTS 14.04 Base.

2.     64-bit base system.

3.     Better memory utilization.

4.     Auto-DFIR package update and customizations.

5.     Latest forensic tools and techniques.

6.     VMware Appliance ready to tackle forensics.

7.     Cross compatibility between Linux and Windows.

8.     Option to install stand-alone via (.iso) or use via VMware Player/Workstation.

9.     Online Documentation Project at ReadTheDocs

10. Expanded Filesystem Support.

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#5) CAINE (Computer Aided Investigative Environment)

Caine is built upon a Linux environment. It is actually a live CD containing a number of forensic tools required for. Since the latest version of CAINE is built on the Ubuntu Linux LTS, MATE, and LightDM, anybody who is familiar with these need not put in extra effort to work on CAINE.

Key Features Of Caine Include

1.      Caine Interface – a user-friendly interface that brings together some well-known forensic tools, many of which are open source.

2.     Updated and optimized environment to conduct a forensic analysis.

3.     Semi-automatic report generator.