5 free digital forensics tools to boost your investigations
Digital forensics plays a crucial role in analyzing and addressing cyberattacks, and it’s a key component of incident response. Additionally, digital forensics provides vital information for auditors, legal teams, and law enforcement agencies in the aftermath of an attack.
Many cutting-edge digital forensics tools are on the market, but for those who cannot afford them, here’s a list of great free solutions to get you started.
Autopsy
Autopsy is a digital forensics platform widely employed by law enforcement agencies, military personnel, and corporate investigators to examine and understand activities on a computer. Although Autopsy is designed to be cross-platform, the latest version is fully functional and tested only on Windows.
bulk_extractor
bulk_extractor is a high-speed tool for digital forensics analysis. It scans various inputs, including disk images, files, and directories, extracting organized information like email addresses, credit card numbers, JPEG images, and JSON fragments. This is achieved without the need to parse file systems or their structures. The extracted data is saved in text files, which can be examined, searched, or utilized as inputs for further forensic investigations.
NetworkMiner
NetworkMiner, an open-source network forensics tool, specializes in extracting artifacts like files, images, emails, and passwords from network traffic captured in PCAP files. Additionally, it can capture live network traffic by sniffing a network interface.
Velociraptor
Velociraptor is a sophisticated digital forensics and incident response tool designed to improve your insight into endpoint activities. At the press of a (few) buttons, perform targeted collection of digital forensic evidence simultaneously across your endpoints, with speed and precision.
WinHex
WinHex is a versatile hexadecimal editor, proving especially useful in the areas of computer forensics, data recovery, low-level data processing, and IT security. It allows users to inspect and modify various file types, as well as recover deleted files or retrieve lost data from hard drives with damaged file systems or digital camera cards.