Tools Fight Forensics

A breadth of anti-forensics tools -- most of them free -- is making it easier for the bad guys to cover their tracks in malware and data theft attacks. "The bottom line is most criminals are not the brightest bolts in the box and they tend to make mistakes, which forensics has been able to use to its advantage," says Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism for Secure Computing. Henry will discuss the increasingly popular anti-forensics tools at a session at InfoSec World in Orlando this week. "But a smarter individual can [today] easily find tools to cover his tracks."

Many of these tools help attackers mask or alter timestamps, which forensics investigators traditionally have used to track down and implicate attackers. "The problem today, in a nutshell, is these freely downloadable tools on the Net make it nearly impossible to use file timestamps as a true evidentiary trail," he says. "There are a few tools that let you change MAC times [timestamps] after the fact... Today you can alter MAC times so that it shows you could not have possibly been the one that perpetrated the crime."

The main types of anti-forensics tools include encryption, disk-wiping, steganography, packing, and binder techniques, Henry says, as well as bypassing known signatures, virtualization, and hiding in memory/RAM.