It takes a lot more than just technical know how to be a digital forensic investigator.
There's a lot of research processes and analytics that also go into the case itself.
Consider a scenario where you need to build a house.
Sure, we need wood, nails, cement, metal, glass and all the other raw materials.
And we also require the skilled laborers and contractors to construct the structure and piece it together.
Apart from the materials, tools and resources, we would have also done our research to ensure that
we understood what is needed for this to be a successful project.
For instance, we would have had to obtain permits to build performed a soil analysis, considered the
weather, and then chosen the types of materials based on the weather, location, soil type and so
on.
It goes without saying that there must be an understanding of fundamental concepts in the field in order
to efficiently carry out the task.
In the same way, we need to have an understanding of the file systems, operating systems, data types
and locations, as well as a thorough understanding of the methods and procedures for preserving data
storage, media and general evidence.
In this lecture we will learn about the following topics.
Asterisk The History of Storage Media.
Asterisk File Systems and Operating Systems.
Asterisk.
What about the data?
Asterisk.
Data Volatility.
Asterisk.
The Paging file and its importance in digital forensics.
The History of Storage Media.
The end result of any investigation is to prove whether something exists or took place in laptops,
desktops, mobile devices, and smart devices.
Data has to be stored somewhere, even if it's just temporarily.
Most of us may be familiar with hard disk drives within laptops, desktops, mobile devices and so on.
But we also need to focus on removable and portable storage devices.
These include DVDs, portable drives, thumb or flash drives, SD and microSD cards.
Older media such as CDs and floppy disks and countless more.
We should also consider that many portable flash drives come in many interesting shapes and sizes as
novelty items and may not take the usual shape of the ordinary rectangular shaped drive.
Another issue to consider is that many of these storage media devices have changed in size over the
years and may be smaller in size usually as a result of evolving technology.
Cloud storage has also cemented its place as a common and cost effective solution, with many companies
offering free cloud storage solutions between 2GB and 15GB to the average user, with the option to
pay for more storage.
Although not a new concept, cloud storage is here to stay.
And with it also comes some challenges to data recovery and forensics as we do not have access to the
physical storage servers.
Fortunat Lee Many cloud storage providers such as Google, Dropbox and Microsoft offer a service of
temporarily holding deleted files in the event that they were mistakenly deleted or need to be recovered.
IBM and the History of Storage Media.
There can never be a story, journal book or even discussion on the history of hard drives and storage
media without mentioning three letters.
IBM.
We're all familiar with this well known tech giant, but we might not all be familiar with some of its
great achievements.
International business machines.
IBM, as we know it, has been around for quite some time.
Known as the Computing-tabulating-recording Company CTR back in the early 1900s.
IBM is better known for building the very first hard disk drive, the first PC, its servers, desktops
and laptops between the years 1956 and 1957.
IBM made major inroads with the development and release of the 305 random access method of accounting
and control Ramac, which utilized the first disk storage technology.
This revolutionary technology weighed in at approximately one ton and was roughly 16ft² in size.
The disk space capacity of this behemoth, however, was only five megabytes.
Megabytes?
Yes, I said megabytes in size, although five megabytes by today's standard is roughly the size of
a high definition photo taken with a mobile device.
All things considered, this really was a monumental achievement for its time.
Before IBM's invention, data was stored on punch cards, which could mount to as many as millions of
cards just to hold a few megabytes.
A major issue faced back then with the introduction of this digital storage was the size of the device.
Transportation by plane and truck may not have been an option for many, and the space to store this
would also have been.
An issue as technology progressed.
IBM announced a much more portable computer in 1975.
Released as the IBM 5100 portable computer in the 1980s.
Specifically, 1981, we saw the birth of the IBM personal computer.
Weighing in at much less than its predecessor.
This portable computer also had a much more affordable price tag of between $8000 and $20,000.
It wasn't until 1981 when IBM released the first personal computer that the portability of computers
was becoming an actual reality, with a price tag of $1,565.
Owners were afforded a keyboard and mouse with options for a monitor printer and floppy drives.
Apart from the floppy drives, this is the standard for today's personal computers.
Along with this newer and more portable technology, there were also improvements in data storage media.
Over the years, which saw advancements for magnetic tape storage, two floppy disks and diskettes,
CDs, DVDs, Blu ray discs and of course, mechanical and solid state drives.
SSDs.