What are the categories of digital forensic tools?

In the modern digital era, digital forensics has emerged as a key field for investigating corporate misconduct, cyber crimes, and other technology related incidents.

The digital forensic tools are specialized software and hardware used by the investigators to collect, analyze, and preserve digital evidence in a manner that is admissible in the court of law. 

What are the categories of digital forensic tools?

1. Disk Forensics: Disk Forensics tools are meticulously designed to examine storage devices such as SSDs, USB drives, and other forms of physical storage. The tools allow the investigators to recover the deleted files, analyze file systems and detect hidden data or partitions. Popular disk forensics tools are EnCase, FTK and Autopsy, offering capabilities like hash analysis, data carving and metadata extraction.

2.  Network Forensic Tools: These digital forensic tools focus on capturing and analyzing network traffic to detect and investigate unauthorized activities including data breaches, hacking attempts, and malware distribution. Commonly used network forensic tools are Wireshark, NetWitness, and TCPdump that provide real-time monitoring, packet analysis and protocol decoding.

3. Mobile Device Forensic Tools: Mobile phones are becoming integral part of our lives. Mobile Device Forensic Tools are used to extract, analyze, and preserve data, have gained prominence. The tools are used to extract, analyze and preserve data from smart phones, tablets and other portable devices. Some common mobile device forensic tools are Oxygen Forensics, Cellebrite and MOBILedit Forensic. These tools can access wide range of data, including call logs, messages, email, photos, app data and videos. 

4. Memory Forensic Tools: Memory Forensic Tools are designed to analyze volatile data in RAM of computer. It uncovers evidence that is not written to the disk, such as open network connections, running processes and encryption keys. Memory forensics tools are used in incident response to detect and analyze rootkits, unauthorized access and malware. Some common tools are Redline and Volatility that captures and analyze memory dumps to reveal hidden or fleeing data.

5. Cloud Forensic Tools: As Cloud Services are popular in every domain; cloud forensic tools have become essential for investigating data stored in the cloud environment. These tools address challenges of cloud forensics including data distribution across multiple servers, encryption and shared responsibility model between cloud providers and users. The tools enable the investigators to collect and analyze data from the cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Digital Forensic Tools are important in today’s cyber-centric world. They provide the means to uncover digital evidence in many contexts, ultimately supporting the process of justice and protecting the digital assets.

also read What are the three types of digital forensics?