Computer Forensics: Incident Response Essentials

Chapter 7. Your Electronic Toolkit

A forensic investigator lives and dies by the tools he or she uses to gather, save, and process evidence. To be successful in this field, you must have a lot of tools. You aren’t collecting these tools to store on a shelf somewhere. This is your Batman utility belt. These are the James Bond devices that you get from Q. Maybe we shouldn’t encourage you to think of yourself as a superhero, but you should think of yourself as someone whose job depends on the successful use of specialized tools that normal people usually don’t need.

Because computer forensics involves the identification, extraction, preservation, and documentation of computer data, you need software and peripherals to deal with computers. In this ...