Determining account usage
Identifying the user behind the keyboard is one of the hardest things you must do when conducting a digital forensic examination. You will have to parse through many artifacts to help make that determination. First, you will want to gather as much information about the user account in question and see whether you can relate it to the physical person. You will want to gain as much information about that user account and its activity related to the matter you are investigating. We will now go over some artifacts from a Windows-based operating system that will help you determine and identify that account activity starting with the user’s last login or password change.
Last login/last password change
The following path will contain information about the user accounts on the system:
C:\windows\system32\config\SAM\Domains\Account\Users
To navigate to the location that contains the user account information, I will use Eric Zimmerman’...
