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I've spent a lot of space in this blog talking about timeline analysis lately, so I wanted to take something of a different tact for a post or two...mostly to let the idea of timeline analysis marinate a bit, and let folks digest that particular analysis technique.

PDF Forensics
Didier Stevens has provided a fantastic resource and tools for analyzing PDF files...so much so, that some have been incorporated into VirusTotal. Ray Yepes has provided an excellent article for locating MYD files, mySql database files used by Adobe Organizer that maintain information about PDF files that have been accessed. Congrats, Ray, on some excellent work!

Web Browser Forensics
When most folks think "web browser forensics", they think cache and cookie files. I also mentioned some other browser stuff that might be of interest...in particular bookmarks and favorites, as well as some other tidbits. Bringing even more to the game, Harry Parsonage has put together an excellent resource describing web browser session restore forensics (woany released a tool inspired by the paper). Here's some additional value add to Harry's information, from the sausage factory.

Associated with web browser forensics, Jeff Hamm has written an excellent (all of the papers are excellent!) regarding Google Toolbar Search Artifacts. Jeff also has a paper available regarding the Adobe Photoshop Album Cache File.

Resources
Woany also has other tools...woanware...available for parsing other data that may be associated with web browser forensics, as well as data from other sources. Some of the other interesting tools include ForensicUserInfo and RegExtract.

NirSoft provides a number of excellent utilities for password recovery, etc. If you're analyzing an acquired image, you may need to boot the image with LiveView and login to run some of the tools.

JADSoftware has several excellent tools, including a couple of free ones. Even the ones that aren't free are definitely worth the purchase price, particularly if you're doing the kind of work that requires you to look at these areas a lot.

Activity
Now and again, I see a posting to a forum or receive an email, and the basic question is, how do I determine if there was activity on a system during a specific time period?

The historical approach to answering this type of question is to look at the file system metadata, and see if there are any file creation, access, or modification times during the window in question. However, this presents us with a couple of challenges. In Vista, MS disabled updating of file last access times by default...it's no longer an option that an administrator can set. Then what happens if we're looking for activity on a system a couple of weeks or months ago? File system metadata will show is the most recent changes to the system, but much of that may be relatively close to our current time and not give us a view into what may have happened during the time window we're interested in.

However, we have more than just file system metadata available to us to answer this type of question (I know...we're circling back to timeline analysis now...):

MFT Analysis: Generate a timeline based on $FILE_NAME attribute timestamps. Chapter 12 of Brian Carrier's File System Forensic Analysis book contains a good deal of information relating to these timestamps.

Event Log Analysis: Generate a timeline based on EVT/EVTX file entries. For EVT records, don't rely on just those in the system32\config\*.evt files; see if there's any indication of records being backed up, and also check the pagefile and unallocated space. All you may need to demonstrate activity during a time window is the event record header information anyway.

Log Files: Windows systems maintain a number of log files that record activity. For example, there's the Task Scheduler log file (SchedLgu.txt), setupapi.log, mrt.log, etc. If you're looking at a Windows XP system, System Restore Points each have an rp.log file that states when the Restore Point was created, as well as the reason for the creation, giving you more than just "something happened on this day". Also, look for application logs, particularly AV application logs...some AV applications may also write to the Application Event Log, in addition to maintaining their own log files.

File Metadata: Lots of applications maintain time-stamped information embedded within the structure of the files they interact with; for example, application Prefetch files on XP and Vista. Also, Scheduled Task/.job files. Office documents are also widely known for maintaining a staggering amount of very useful metadata.

Registry Analysis: Ah...the Registry. In some cases, time-stamped information is maintained as Registry key LastWrite times, but there is also considerable information maintained in binary value data, as well. The system-wide hives...SAM, Software, System, and Security...will maintain some useful information (LastShutdownTime, etc.), but you may find more valuable information in the user's NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT hives. Also, don't forget that you may also find considerable information in the unallocated space within hive files! Specifically, when keys are deleted, their LastWrite time is updated to reflect when they were deleted, providing what may be some very valuable information.

Of course, when we're talking about Registry hives, we also have to keep in mind that we may have hive files available in either XP System Restore Points, or within Volume Shadow Copies.

In short, if you need to determine if there was activity on a system during a particular window, and perhaps relate that activity to a particular user account, there are a number of data sources available to you. This type of question lends itself very well to timeline analysis, too.