Mastering Windows Network Forensics and Investigation, 2nd Edition

Creating Timelines

Timelines are graphical representations of events in chronological order. There are manual methods of creating them and automated methods. The most manual method possible is creating a spreadsheet listing all events with their time stamps in a separate column. When you have finished, you can sort them by the time stamp column, creating a chronological listing of events. This information can be printed as is, sent to a graphing utility, or otherwise enhanced for presentation.

This can be a very time-consuming process, especially when you are faced with presenting and analyzing time frames from multiple sources (i.e., file metadata, logs, network captures) of network data. Static filesystem timeline analysis tools have been well ...