Encase and data recovery

From: Young, Brandon (Brandon.Youngat_private)
Date: Tue Mar 12 2002 - 09:53:38 PST

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    All,
    
    	My colleague and I setup a default installation of IIS web server 5.0 on Windows 2000 Server using NTFS. We put
    together a mock incident response scenario where one of us broke into the machine dropped tools on it, edited web server
    logs to cover tracks, deleted event logs to cover up auditing tracks and then deleted all of the tools off. 
    	During the incident response phase we used Encase to investigate what actually was done to the box, since from
    the investigator's point of view, the logs had obviously been edited and therefore couldn't be relied upon. When he
    looked through the evidence files there was no remnants left of the original logs, as well as only a partial listing of
    the tools that were dropped on during the break in. 
    	The question we have is why weren't we able to recover the original logs? What I did when I broke into the
    server was stop the w3svc and tftp the IIS logs up and edited them, deleted the old logs and replaced them with the
    edited versions. In addition to this Encase only saw about three of the six or so tools I used while I was in the
    server. Why was Encase only able to recover some of tools used in the incident?
    
    One answer we came up with was that the OS used the unallocated space where the tools previous existed and therefore
    were overwritten. But this seems unlikely since there wasn't any legitimate activity on the machine. This box was only
    used for this scenario.
    
    Any ideas?
    
    Thanks,
    
    Brandon Young
    CISSP, CCSA, CCSE, CCNA, MCSE
    Information Security Engineer
    Honeywell International
    Global IT Security & Systems Assurance
    Email: brandon.youngat_private
    Voice: 480.592.3988
    Intranet: http://itg.honeywell.com/secarch
     
    
    
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