Friday, March 13, 2009

Useful little tools.

Mail Viewer for Outlook Express versions 4+ (.idx .mbx and .dbx), Windows Vista Mail and Windows Live mail databases including .eml files. It is very similar to OE Reader and the web site states that it is actually based on MITeC Outlook Express Reader. No installation required, it has only one 520 KB executable file. The viewer handles attachments quite well (text and HTML view) and the most importantly it is absolutely free. It works on Windows 95 --> Vista.

This web site has several interesting little application that may be useful in digital forensics http://www.mitec.cz/

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver is only 266 KB in size (compressed), 'works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows' and allows mounting dd images in read & write and read only mode. dd images can be mounted with right click from Windows Explorer and by selecting mount new virtual disk (Picture 1). It only works with non-splitted dd images and doesn't accept encase images. This small utility with seamless integration into Windows Explorer also allowing you to right click on selected drive and acquire dd image (Picture 2). I have compared this image with dd image of the same drive acquired with FTK Imager and md5 hash matched. ImDisk actually was about 8% faster in acquiring the image then latest version of FTK Imager, but it doesn't create a log file and it is unclear how ImgDisk handles bad sectors and errors. I haven't played with command line switches yet, so the functionality may be already there.

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