Many DVR users believe that by deleting video through the DVR interface, they are rendering video unrecoverable. Fortunately for forensic investigators, this is not the case. In most instances, when video is deleted through the DVR interface, only the index (or accessibility) to that video is being deleted. Assuming the video itself has not been overwritten, DVR Examiner may be able to recover it.
Data recovery is a key function of DVR Examiner for all our users, despite varying case load and case nature. An efficient workflow, and the ability for users to customize the workflow they follow based on their particular case needs, ensures rapid time to evidence, and is a major focus as we release new versions of DVR Examiner.
Data recovery with DVR Examiner works by reverse engineering the many different DVR filesystems to locate and extract video footage. Most DVRs use a proprietary filesystem. Sometimes this is in conjunction with a known filesystem, often Ext 2 or 3, but even in these cases the video data is typically located in a large proprietary partition which won’t be recognized by conventional computer forensic tools. However, if you take a closer look at these “unallocated” spaces, you may find some familiar structures and multitudes of highly compressed video data.
Hikvision-based systems store date/time metadata a little differently than other DVR filesystems, and when it comes to adding support for new DVRs into DVR Examiner, or recovering video manually for a laboratory case, understanding date/time information is critical.
One ongoing debate within the traditional computer forensics community has been how to respond to a running computer in the field. When you arrive on scene to a running computer, do you go straight to pulling the plug, or do you conduct an orderly shutdown of the computer?
In a previous blog post, we discussed why it is advantageous to utilize DD forensic images as opposed to E01 when analyzing hard drives from DVRs. In this post, we’ll look at another option – cloned hard drives. Cloned hard drives of the original DVR hard drive are often connected to the DVR in an … Continued
With DVR Examiner 3.1.2., we have released a new “Custom Fields” feature to compliment these reporting capabilities.
There are some new reporting features in DVR Examiner 3.1. In this post, we’ll take a close look at forensic reports from DVR recovery.
Digital investigators and examiners creating forensic images for DVR analysis utilize two main file formats to store bit-for-bit copies of hard drives used in their examinations. E01 forensic image file format is the default imaging option for many computer forensics tools and has become a de-facto standard of sorts. While somewhat lesser known, the raw … Continued
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