Tools

I like to be open to different tools that can be used to assist in analysis, and for those of you who know me, sometimes I write my own. However, I wanted to take a moment to point out some tools that I've found recently that appear to be and have been very useful...

From Claus, I learned about a little tool called DiskDigger from Dymitry Bryant which reportedly allows you to recover deleted files from drives. I thought, wow, this is pretty cool...something to try out with respect to recovering deleted files. So I downloaded a copy and fired it up, and with the first version, saw that it only identified the two physical disks on my system. I had mounted an image file as a read-only drive letter via SmartMount and wondered why this "drive" hadn't been detected. I reached out to Dmitry, expecting to maybe hear back within a couple of days...instead, within relatively short order, Dmitry returned my email with a link to an updated version of DiskDigger, as well as to another tool I'd looked at, NTFSWalker. Now, both tools will recognize drives and volumes, and there is a separate tab for pointing the tool to an image file. Very cool! I thanked Dmitry for his quick response, and he pointed out that he's a one-man shop (wow, THAT sounds familiar...) and that if you find something amiss with a tool or if you have a question, his turn-around time is pretty quick...which is something I can personally attest to.

From JADSoftware comes Internet Evidence Finder, a nice little tool that searches for Facebook chat messages and page fragments, Yahoo chat, and MSN chat messages on drives and within memory dumps. I found my initial reference to this tool on the Forensics from the Sausage Factory blog, where the DC1743 says that he ran the tool against a mounted drive image.

If you're interested in extracting MSOffice OLE document metadata, take a look at OLEDeconstruct from Sanderson Forensics. The sample used to demonstrate the tool is the ever popular Blair document from the ComputerBytesMan. The wmd.pl and oledmp.pl Perl scripts I wrote are still freely available and provided on the DVD accompanying Windows Forensic Analysis, both the first and second editions.