Top Open-Source Tools for Windows Forensic Analysis
In this section, we will be discussing some of the open-source tools that are available for conducting Forensic Analysis in the Windows Operating System.
1. Magnet Encrypted Disk Detector
This tool is used to check the encrypted physical drives. This tool supports PGP, Safe boot encrypted volumes, Bitlocker, etc. You can download it from here
2. Magnet RAM Capture
This tool is used to analyze the physical memory of the system. You can download it from here
3. Wireshark
This is a network analyzer tool and a capture tool that is used to see what traffic is going in your network. You can download it from here
4. RAM Capture
As the name suggests, this is a free tool that is used to extract the entire contents of the volatile memory i.e. RAM. You can download it from here
5. NMAP
This is the most popular tool that is used to find open ports on the target machine. Using this tool you can find the vulnerability of any target to hack. You can download it from here
6. Network Miner
This tool is used as a passive network sniffer to capture or to detect the operating systems ports, sessions, hostnames, etc. You can download it from here
7. Autopsy
This is the GUI based tool, that is used to analyze hard disks and smartphones. You can download it from here
8. Forensic Investigator
This is a Splunk toolkit which is used in HEX conversion, Base64 conversion, metascan lookups, and many more other features that are essential in forensic analysis. You can download it from here
9. HashMyFiles
This tool is used to calculate the SHA1 and MD5 hashes. It works on all the latest websites. You can download it from here
10. Crowd Response
This tool is used to gather the system information for incident response. You can download it from here
11. ExifTool
This tool is used to read, write, and edit meta information from a number of files. You can download it from here
12. FAW (Forensic Acquisition of Websites)
This tool is used to acquire web pages image, HTML, source code of the web page. This tool can be integrated with Wireshark. You can download it from here
In 2024, there is such a large variety of forensic tools available in the market. Some are free and open-source and some tools charge annual or monthly fees. You just need to identify your requirements and choose a tool that best suits your requirements.
Windows Forensic Analysis
When doing Windows Forensic Analysis, it can be quite overwhelming to see the large amount of data that one needs to collect, assuming you know what you are looking for. In case you don’t know what are you looking for, the entire process becomes twice as hard.
In this article we will be discussing following topics:
- What is Windows Forensic Analysis?
- What are Forensic Artifacts?
- Top Open-Source Tools for Windows Forensic Analysis