Finally... Timeline Analysis Links

Finally

As I’m writing the first paragraph of a paper for my Masters of Science program the only thought that keeps running through my mind is finally. I finally reached not only the last week of class but the last week of my master’s program. In a few days I will finally complete the MSIA program when I submit my paper and my experience -not the knowledge- will gradually become a distant memory.

The second thought to run through my mind was everything on my to do list. My list has been piling up over the months and one of the more recent items on the list is the lack of my blog posts over the past few weeks. This will hopefully change once I’m done with school and a few of the future posts will cover some of the things I’m looking at including Java vulnerability exploit artifacts, my introduction to log analysis, and possibly a new crime scene camera that people are putting into their homes.

In the meantime here are a few links about timelines.

Timeline Analysis Links

Kristinn has an excellent post about analyzing timelines which can be found here. I previously blogged about reviewing timelines with Excel (post is here) and Calc (post is here). I created the timelines using mactime and redirected the output to a csv file which I then imported into Excel. Kristinn approaches analyzing timelines with Excel a different way. Kristinn mentioned that filtering is not optimal with mactime and Excel so he uses the CSV output module in log2timeline to create the timeline. One of the limitations I found with Excel was the limit on the number of variables you can filter on using basic filters (Calc had a higher limit but it was still only eight variables). This was one of the reasons I looked into using advanced filters, Kristinn's approach is really interesting since the CSV module breaks up the description field which makes it easier to filter on using basic filters. His write-up is very informative and educational. Trying out this approach has been added to my to do list. Kristinn, thanks again for the write-up and sharing this information.

One of the downsides to being state public sector employee – especially for New York state- is the lack of funds to attend trainings and conferences. This is the main reason why I like when speakers share their conference presentation slides since it lets people who couldn’t attend the conference (aka me) to see some of the presented material. Mandiant posted their DoD Cyber Crime 2011 presentations and one of them was Rob Lee’s Super Timeline Analysis presentation. My biggest take away from Rob's slides was his research on the Windows time rules (I was already familiar with the other content in the slides since I read Rob's post on the SANs forensic blog about supertimelines and volume shadow copy timelines). The Windows time rules (slides 15 and 16) outline how the timestamps in the Standard Information Attribute and Filename Attribute are changed by actions taken against a file. For example, you can see the difference between the changes to a file's timestamps when it is moved locally as compared being moved to another volume. The charts are a great reference and thank you Rob for sharing this information.