Timeline introduction

One question, which is very prominent in forensics is, "When?"

In other words, time is a very important factor at which analytics is based in the process of forensics. There are many artifacts that we use in an investigation which have temporal characteristics. These characteristics allow us to build the whole picture of an incident.

Moreover, timeline analysis could help when we analyze different types of evidence. Timeline analysis may be built on the base of any source that has timestamps. This could be the metadata of the filesystem, registry, event log files, log files of applications, memory, network traffic, and so on.

Certainly, the timeline is one of the most useful techniques that is applied in digital forensics. However, this is based on the analysis of particular artifacts, so it is very important to understand how to analyze the artifacts that are suppliers of timeline events.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the idea underlying the timeline,...