Setting up a forensic workstation - Part II

In the last blog post, Setting up a forensic workstation - Part I, we set up and configured a Windows 10 Pro VM using VirtualBox. With this newly built virtual machine we will now setup and install some free forensic tools and applications needed to perform digital forensic investigations. My plan is to show new users they can accurately perform digital forensic investigations using free and open source tools. There is a time and a place for paid commercial tools in the digital forensic community - but you do not have to pay thousands of dollars to practice and learn the basics of digital forensics and incident response. So without further delay, let’s get started installing our forensic tools.

Setting up a forensic workstation - Part I

In order to perform digital forensic investigations, it is important to have a workstation that has been previously set up, configured with your common forensic tools and scripts, and validated to ensure that everything is working as expected. Nothing is worse than responding to an incident and finding out that some tool you installed isn’t working because it is missing a dependency; Or the last update you ran accidentally broke some tool. Being prepared with a baseline system that has been tested and validated to work properly will alleviate these concerns.