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Practical Windows Forensics

You're reading from   Practical Windows Forensics Leverage the power of digital forensics for Windows systems

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2016
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781783554096
Length 322 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Concepts
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Toc

Table of Contents (15) Chapters Close

Preface 1. The Foundations and Principles of Digital Forensics FREE CHAPTER 2. Incident Response and Live Analysis 3. Volatile Data Collection 4. Nonvolatile Data Acquisition 5. Timeline 6. Filesystem Analysis and Data Recovery 7. Registry Analysis 8. Event Log Analysis 9. Windows Files 10. Browser and E-mail Investigation 11. Memory Forensics 12. Network Forensics appA. Building a Forensic Analysis Environment appB. Case Study

Prefetch files

To try to answer the previous question, we can start analyzing the prefetch files. From DART, open the WinPrefetchView tool. This tool will automatically parse the prefetch files of the live system and view their results in human readable format.

After spending some time in viewing the files and searching for the executable named epqe, we can find that eqpe.exe ran just two seconds after a file named latest_report.pdf.exe ran in the system, and at the same second the Explorer.exe started:

Prefetch files

As we can see, the first filename is very suspicious. It is located under C:\Users\<<UserName>>\Downloads\latest_report.pdf.exe. If we tried to search this location for this file, we won't find it. In the list of files used by this latest_report.pdf.exe file, according to WinPrefetchView, we will find the epqe.exe file used or created by this file:

Prefetch files

However, what made the victim download this malicious executable?

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