Thursday, May 21, 2009

FTK Imager can acquire RAM


FTK Imager 2.6.0 got a new functionality. Finally, it can capture RAM. There is no portable version as yet, so I can't see much use for it at this stage unless it can be used with F-response? I found FTK Imager be much slower compared to my favourite X-Ways Forensics tool. Additionally, I was unable to acquire RAM with the new FTK Imager on Win 2003 Server with 8GB RAM, the acquisition just stopped at 48%. I should mention that the new version of this popular imaging tool got a few bug fixes and 'improvements' listed here.

Speaking of RAM, VMware vSphere 4 supports a few TB of memory on the host server and up to 256GB of memory for a guest. That's a lot of RAM and perhaps this is the future of any forensic lab. Whilst the Cloud is often viewed as a "cost savings" that comes together with a loss of control of the computing infrastructure and various information security issues, the future may be in private cloud networks. These private clouds are capable of delivering flexible computer networks that are able to accelerate when and where it is needed most.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Parsing setupapi.log

I mentioned about setupapi.log files in one of my posts a few months ago. Since that time a couple of good tools were released that makes my life easier when working with setupapi.log files.

One of such tools is called SetupAPI Extractor or SAEX. It is still in beta and is currently free. The tool only works with Win XP setupapi.log files and there is no support for Vista's setupapi.app.log and setupapi.dev.log files yet. The best thing about this tool is its ability to parse the log files and extract only
the information you need.

Another tool I often use to work with various log files including setupapi.log files is Mandiant Highlighter. It was previously mentioned on Cyberspeak and is free to download. It works with ANY text files and allows users to highlight relevant keywords or remove unrelated lines. In case of setupapi.log files, setup event id like #-199, #140 or placeholders such Device_Description, Manufacturer_Name or Hardware_ID can be either displayed or removed, making the information contained in Setupapi logs more manageable.