Web Forensics Matthew M. Kimball
Overview Purpose Where & How Data Is Stored Private Browsing Where Else to Look
Purpose Reconstruct suspect’s browsing Cyberstalking Cyberterrorism Child Pornography Fraud IP Theft Cracks, Patches, Torrents
Where Obvious Less Obvious Cache / Temporary Internet Files Cookies Favorites History Less Obvious DNS Cache PlugIns More to come…
Profiles Profiles can be moved. Profile ‘owner’ doesn’t indicate guilt. Share passwords?
Internet Explorer index.dat files View cache…see what they saw Cookies, History, & Temp Stores: Timestamps Headers Visited URLs Cached pages …in a binary format View cache…see what they saw
Pasco (IE)
Web Historian (IE)
FireFox *.sqlite about:cache “Deleted” favorites are recoverable Memory Disk Offline “Deleted” favorites are recoverable FF automatically backups favorites Not deleted when clearing data
FireFox about:cache browser.cache.disk.enable = false…disable disk caching.
FireFox about:cache disk cache
FireFox MozzilaCacheView
FireFox MozillaHistoryView High visit count = intent = guilty
Opera cookies4.dat dcache4.url opr*.* Binary index of cache Cached files in same format as originals but missing extension
Opera opera:cache
What Is Really Meant By Private? "Incognito is designed to hide your browsing from your computer, not hide it from the Web," says Google engineer Sundar Pichai.
Incognito & InPrivate Still Stores on HDD PC Inspector File Recovery Recovered a lot but not Incognito or InPrivate data. Since it’s written to the drive…it’s recoverable Maybe not with free software but likely with FTK.
Where Else To Look Downloads Clipboard Extensions (FireFox) Not deleted after using Incognito & InPrivate Opera manages torrents Mostly illegal… Clipboard clipbrd.exe Extensions (FireFox)
Where Else To Look SharedObjects / Plugins Tested & failed a break.com visit. Must disable on Macromedia’s website. Requires more work to delete.
DNS Cache Windows Mac /ipconfig displaydns /ipconfig flushdns Lists websites even after clearing info stored by browsers. /ipconfig flushdns Clears DNS listings Mac dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host dscacheutil -flushcache
HOSTS Maps host names to IP addresses. Redirect www.csus.edu to site containing illegal images Favorites addresses may be altered Compare with HOSTS files, caches, and current content on site.
HOSTS
DNS Cache Windows Lists entries while using InPrivate & Incognito
RAM Disk Allows RAM to act like a hard drive Simply relocate where cache is stored Erased just like RAM Much more difficult to recover, if possible at all! Unless it’s in swap or slack space
Still Can’t Find Anything? Recover Deleted Files Page files Opera: Group Project Slack space ISP logs Network & router logs
Tools Web Historian Pasco IE Historian FTK EnCase
Summary Prevents average users using the same computer from revealing your tracks… If it wasn’t bleached/shredded…they will find it on the hard drive…