For this tutorial I decided to take the digital forensic tools in backtrack for a test drive, I will be retrieving and analyzing data from a specific user’s hard-drive and searching through the media for artifacts such as browser history, images, email. To accomplish this I’ll be using tools like vinetto, pasco and others, I won’t be using autopsy in this tutorial as I think it’s been well documented in plenty of other sites, nevertheless it’s one of the best open source forensics tool included in the backtrack distribution.
Most people today are using some type of electronic device, like: cell phones, GPS, PDA, laptops, PC’s etc…, most of this devices leave behind artifacts or footprints that can provide a wealth of information as to how the device were used. Digital forensics is the discipline of retrieving artifacts such as email messages or internet browser cache from media, such those items can be analyzed and processed. Computer forensics is an emerging discipline that has exploded in popularity in resent years. It’s an interesting field and lots of security IT professionals are trying to learn more about it. Large numbers of companies are starting to turn to computer forensics tools because of their capabilities. Some of the forensics packages release by the leading vendors can be quite expensive, single licenses for some forensics software can cost as much as $4000. Distributions such as Helix and Backtrack along with other open sources tools allow individual with limited resources to perform acquisitions and forensics analysis.

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