Virtualization And Forensics

Virtualization and Forensics: A Digital Forensic Investigators Guide to Virtual Environments offers an in-depth view into the world of virtualized environments and the implications they have on forensic investigations. Named a 2011 Best Digital Forensics Book by InfoSec Reviews, this guide gives you the end-to-end knowledge needed to identify server, desktop, and portable virtual environments, including: VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, and Sun. It covers technological advances in virtualization tools, methods, and issues in digital forensic investigations, and explores trends and emerging technologies surrounding virtualization technology. This book consists of three parts. Part I explains the process of virtualization and the different types of virtualized environments. Part II details how virtualization interacts with the basic forensic process, describing the methods used to find virtualization artifacts in dead and live environments as well as identifying the virtual activities that affect the examination process. Part III addresses advanced virtualization issues, such as the challenges of virtualized environments, cloud computing, and the future of virtualization. This book will be a valuable resource for forensic investigators (corporate and law enforcement) and incident response professionals. Named a 2011 Best Digital Forensics Book by InfoSec Reviews Gives you the end-to-end knowledge needed to identify server, desktop, and portable virtual environments, including: VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, and Sun Covers technological advances in virtualization tools, methods, and issues in digital forensic investigations Explores trends and emerging technologies surrounding virtualization technology

One of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry for the past few years, virtualization has matured into a practical requirement for many best-practice business scenarios, becoming an invaluable tool for security professionals at companies of every size. In addition to saving time and other resources, virtualization affords unprecedented means for intrusion and malware detection, prevention, recovery, and analysis. Taking a practical approach in a growing market underserved by books, this hands-on title is the first to combine in one place the most important and sought-after uses of virtualization for enhanced security, including sandboxing, disaster recovery and high availability, forensic analysis, and honeypotting. Already gaining buzz and traction in actual usage at an impressive rate, Gartner research indicates that virtualization will be the most significant trend in IT infrastructure and operations over the next four years. A recent report by IT research firm IDC predicts the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011. With this growth in adoption, becoming increasingly common even for small and midsize businesses, security is becoming a much more serious concern, both in terms of how to secure virtualization and how virtualization can serve critical security objectives. Titles exist and are on the way to fill the need for securing virtualization, but security professionals do not yet have a book outlining the many security applications of virtualization that will become increasingly important in their job requirements. This book is the first to fill that need, covering tactics such as isolating a virtual environment on the desktop for application testing, creating virtualized storage solutions for immediate disaster recovery and high availability across a network, migrating physical systems to virtual systems for analysis, and creating complete virtual systems to entice hackers and expose potential threats to actual production systems. About the Technologies A sandbox is an isolated environment created to run and test applications that might be a security risk. Recovering a compromised system is as easy as restarting the virtual machine to revert to the point before failure. Employing virtualization on actual production systems, rather than just test environments, yields similar benefits for disaster recovery and high availability. While traditional disaster recovery methods require time-consuming reinstallation of the operating system and applications before restoring data, backing up to a virtual machine makes the recovery process much easier, faster, and efficient. The virtual machine can be restored to same physical machine or an entirely different machine if the original machine has experienced irreparable hardware failure. Decreased downtime translates into higher availability of the system and increased productivity in the enterprise. Virtualization has been used for years in the field of forensic analysis, but new tools, techniques, and automation capabilities are making it an increasingly important tool. By means of virtualization, an investigator can create an exact working copy of a physical computer on another machine, including hidden or encrypted partitions, without altering any data, allowing complete access for analysis. The investigator can also take a live ?snapshot? to review or freeze the target computer at any point in time, before an attacker has a chance to cover his tracks or inflict further damage.

Virtualization and Forensics: A Digital Forensic Investigators Guide to Virtual Environments provides an introduction to virtualized environments and their implications on forensic investigations. It emphasizes the need for organizations using virtualization to be proactive rather than reactive. Being proactive means learning the methods in this book to train staff, so when an incident occurs, they can quickly perform the forensics and minimize the damage to their systems. The book is organized into three parts. Part I deals with the virtualization process and the different types of virtualized environments. It explains how virtualization happens along with the various methods of virtualization, hypervisors, and the main categories of virtualization. It discusses server virtualization, desktop virtualization, and the various portable virtualization programs, emulators, and appliances. Part II details how virtualization interacts with the basic forensic process. It describes the methods used to find virtualization artifacts in dead and live environments, and identifies the virtual activities that affect the examination process. Part III addresses advanced virtualization issues, such as the challenges of virtualized environments, cloud computing, and the future of virtualization. Named a 2011 Best Digital Forensics Book by InfoSec Reviews Gives you the end-to-end knowledge needed to identify server, desktop, and portable virtual environments, including: VMware, Parallels, Microsoft, and Sun Covers technological advances in virtualization tools, methods, and issues in digital forensic investigations Explores trends and emerging technologies surrounding virtualization technology

To reduce the risk of digital forensic evidence being called into question in judicial proceedings, it is important to have a rigorous methodology and set of procedures for conducting digital forensic investigations and examinations. Digital forensic investigation in the cloud computing environment, however, is in infancy due to the comparatively recent prevalence of cloud computing. Cloud Storage Forensics presents the first evidence-based cloud forensic framework. Using three popular cloud storage services and one private cloud storage service as case studies, the authors show you how their framework can be used to undertake research into the data remnants on both cloud storage servers and client devices when a user undertakes a variety of methods to store, upload, and access data in the cloud. By determining the data remnants on client devices, you gain a better understanding of the types of terrestrial artifacts that are likely to remain at the Identification stage of an investigation. Once it is determined that a cloud storage service account has potential evidence of relevance to an investigation, you can communicate this to legal liaison points within service providers to enable them to respond and secure evidence in a timely manner. Learn to use the methodology and tools from the first evidenced-based cloud forensic framework Case studies provide detailed tools for analysis of cloud storage devices using popular cloud storage services Includes coverage of the legal implications of cloud storage forensic investigations Discussion of the future evolution of cloud storage and its impact on digital forensics

Digital forensics deals with the acquisition, preservation, examination, analysis and presentation of electronic evidence. Networked computing, wireless communications and portable electronic devices have expanded the role of digital forensics beyond traditional computer crime investigations. Practically every crime now involves some aspect of digital evidence; digital forensics provides the techniques and tools to articulate this evidence. Digital forensics also has myriad intelligence applications. Furthermore, it has a vital role in information assurance - investigations of security breaches yield valuable information that can be used to design more secure systems. Advances in Digital Forensics V describes original research results and innovative applications in the discipline of digital forensics. In addition, it highlights some of the major technical and legal issues related to digital evidence and electronic crime investigations. The areas of coverage include: themes and issues, forensic techniques, integrity and privacy, network forensics, forensic computing, investigative techniques, legal issues and evidence management. This book is the fifth volume in the annual series produced by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 11.9 on Digital Forensics, an international community of scientists, engineers and practitioners dedicated to advancing the state of the art of research and practice in digital forensics. The book contains a selection of twenty-three edited papers from the Fifth Annual IFIP WG 11.9 International Conference on Digital Forensics, held at the National Center for Forensic Science, Orlando, Florida, USA in the spring of 2009. Advances in Digital Forensics V is an important resource for researchers, faculty members and graduate students, as well as for practitioners and individuals engaged in research and development efforts for the law enforcement and intelligence communities.

An authoritative guide to investigating high-technologycrimes Internet crime is seemingly ever on the rise, making the needfor a comprehensive resource on how to investigate these crimeseven more dire. This professional-level book--aimed at lawenforcement personnel, prosecutors, and corporateinvestigators--provides you with the training you need in order toacquire the sophisticated skills and software solutions to stay onestep ahead of computer criminals. Specifies the techniques needed to investigate, analyze, anddocument a criminal act on a Windows computer or network Places a special emphasis on how to thoroughly investigatecriminal activity and now just perform the initial response Walks you through ways to present technically complicatedmaterial in simple terms that will hold up in court Features content fully updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 andWindows 7 Covers the emerging field of Windows Mobile forensics Also included is a classroom support package to ensure academicadoption, Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation,2nd Edition offers help for investigating high-technologycrimes.

While cloud computing continues to transform developments in information technology services, these advancements have contributed to a rise in cyber attacks; producing an urgent need to extend the applications of investigation processes. Cybercrime and Cloud Forensics: Applications for Investigation Processes presents a collection of research and case studies of applications for investigation processes in cloud computing environments. This reference source brings together the perspectives of cloud customers, security architects, and law enforcement agencies in the developing area of cloud forensics.

In a unique and systematic way, this book discusses the security and privacy aspects of the cloud, and the relevant cloud forensics. Cloud computing is an emerging yet revolutionary technology that has been changing the way people live and work. However, with the continuous growth of cloud computing and related services, security and privacy has become a critical issue. Written by some of the top experts in the field, this book specifically discusses security and privacy of the cloud, as well as the digital forensics of cloud data, applications, and services. The first half of the book enables readers to have a comprehensive understanding and background of cloud security, which will help them through the digital investigation guidance and recommendations found in the second half of the book. Part One of Security, Privacy and Digital Forensics in the Cloud covers cloud infrastructure security; confidentiality of data; access control in cloud IaaS; cloud security and privacy management; hacking and countermeasures; risk management and disaster recovery; auditing and compliance; and security as a service (SaaS). Part Two addresses cloud forensics – model, challenges, and approaches; cyberterrorism in the cloud; digital forensic process and model in the cloud; data acquisition; digital evidence management, presentation, and court preparation; analysis of digital evidence; and forensics as a service (FaaS). Thoroughly covers both security and privacy of cloud and digital forensics Contributions by top researchers from the U.S., the European and other countries, and professionals active in the field of information and network security, digital and computer forensics, and cloud and big data Of interest to those focused upon security and implementation, and incident management Logical, well-structured, and organized to facilitate comprehension Security, Privacy and Digital Forensics in the Cloud is an ideal book for advanced undergraduate and master's-level students in information systems, information technology, computer and network forensics, as well as computer science. It can also serve as a good reference book for security professionals, digital forensics practitioners and cloud service providers.