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Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The chain of custody is a documented, chronological record detailing the seizure, custody, control, transfer, analysis, and disposition of evidence. Maintaining this record proves that the evidence was protected and unaltered, which is essential for court admissibility.

Each transfer or access must be logged with date, time, and handler.

Breaks in the chain can compromise the legal validity of evidence.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

When collecting evidence from a running system, volatile and critical evidence such as security logs should be collected first as they are most susceptible to being overwritten or lost. Security logs may contain valuable information on unauthorized access or malicious activity.

Chat room logs, recently accessed files, and temporary internet files are important but often less volatile or can be recovered from disk later.

NIST SP 800-86 and SANS Incident Response Guidelines prioritize the collection of volatile logs and memory contents first.

This approach helps ensure preservation of time-sensitive data critical for forensic analysis.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The foremost principle in digital forensics isnever altering the original evidence. This ensures integrity, authenticity, and admissibility in court.

Investigators analyze forensic copies, not originals.

Write-blockers and hashing are used to prevent changes.

Any alteration—intentional or accidental—can invalidate evidence.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Netstatis a command-line network utility tool used to monitor active network connections, open ports, and network routing tables. In the context of detecting data exfiltration potentially using steganographic methods, netstat can help a forensic investigator identify suspicious or unauthorized network connections through which hidden data may be leaving an organization.

While netstat itself does not detect steganography within files, it can be used to monitor data flows and connections to external hosts, which is critical for identifying channels where steganographically hidden data could be transmitted.

Data Encryption Standard (DES)is a cryptographic algorithm, not a forensic tool.

MP3Stegois a steganography tool for embedding data in MP3 files and is not designed for detection or monitoring.

Forensic Toolkit (FTK)is a forensic analysis software focused on acquiring and analyzing data from storage devices, not network monitoring.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Solid-state drives (SSDs) use flash memory and have no moving mechanical parts, making them more resistant to physical shock and damage compared to magnetic drives, which rely on spinning platters.

This resilience makes SSDs favorable in environments with higher physical risk.

However, data recovery from SSDs can be more complex due to wear-leveling and TRIM features.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the protocol used to send email messages from a client to a mail server or between mail servers. It handles the transmission of outgoing mail. IMAP and POP3 are protocols used for retrieving email, not sending it. SNMP is used for network management.

IMAP and POP3 are for receiving emails.

SNMP is unrelated to email delivery.

This is documented in RFC 5321 and supported by all standard email system operations, including forensic analyses.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Snow is a specialized steganalysis tool that detects and extracts hidden data encoded in whitespace characters within text files and other mediums. It is widely used in digital forensic investigations for detecting covert data hiding methods such as whitespace steganography.

Data Doctor is a general data recovery tool, not specialized in steganalysis.

FTK is a general forensic suite, not specifically designed for steganography detection.

MP3Stego is focused on audio steganography.

NIST and digital forensics literature recognize Snow as a valuable tool in workflows designed to detect hidden data in text or similar carriers.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In incident response, after collecting volatile data (such as contents of RAM), the next priority is often to collect network-related evidence such as active network connections. Network connections can reveal ongoing communications, attacker activity, command and control channels, or data exfiltration paths.

Running processes and temporary data are also volatile but typically collected simultaneously or immediately after volatile memory.

File timestamps relate to non-volatile data and are collected later after volatile data acquisition to preserve evidence integrity.

This sequence is supported by NIST SP 800-86 and SANS Incident Handler’s Handbook which emphasize the volatility of evidence and recommend capturing network state immediately after memory.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Steganography is the technique of hiding information within another file, message, image, or medium to conceal the existence of the information itself. It differs from encryption in that the data is hidden, not just scrambled.

Steganalysis is the detection or analysis of hidden data.

Encryption and cryptography involve scrambling data but do not inherently hide its existence.

NIST and digital forensics guidelines define steganography as the art of concealed writing or data hiding, used by criminals to evade detection.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

An email header contains metadata about the email including sender, receiver, routing information, and content details. TheContent-Typeheader specifies the media type of the email body (e.g., text/plain, text/html, multipart/mixed), indicating how the email content should be interpreted.

Sender's MAC address is not typically included in email headers.

Number of pages is not relevant to email metadata.

Message-Digest is a term related to cryptographic hashes but is not a standard email header field.