Top Open-Source Tools for Windows Forensic Analysis

In this section, we will be discussing some of the open-source tools that are available for conducting Forensic Analysis in the Windows Operating System.

1. Magnet Encrypted Disk Detector

This tool is used to check the encrypted physical drives. This tool supports PGP, Safe boot encrypted volumes, Bitlocker, etc. You can download it from here

2. Magnet RAM Capture

This tool is used to analyze the physical memory of the system. You can download it from here

3. Wireshark

This is a network analyzer tool and a capture tool that is used to see what traffic is going in your network. You can download it from here

4. RAM Capture

As the name suggests, this is a free tool that is used to extract the entire contents of the volatile memory i.e. RAM. You can download it from here

5. NMAP

This is the most popular tool that is used to find open ports on the target machine. Using this tool you can find the vulnerability of any target to hack. You can download it from here

6. Network Miner

This tool is used as a passive network sniffer to capture or to detect the operating systems ports, sessions, hostnames, etc. You can download it from here

7. Autopsy

This is the GUI based tool, that is used to analyze hard disks and smartphones. You can download it from here

8. Forensic Investigator

This is a Splunk toolkit which is used in HEX conversion, Base64 conversion, metascan lookups, and many more other features that are essential in forensic analysis. You can download it from here

9. HashMyFiles

This tool is used to calculate the SHA1 and MD5 hashes. It works on all the latest websites. You can download it from here

10. Crowd Response

This tool is used to gather the system information for incident response. You can download it from here

11. ExifTool

This tool is used to read, write, and edit meta information from a number of files. You can download it from here

12. FAW (Forensic Acquisition of Websites)

This tool is used to acquire web pages image, HTML, source code of the web page. This tool can be integrated with Wireshark. You can download it from here

In 2024, there is such a large variety of forensic tools available in the market. Some are free and open-source and some tools charge annual or monthly fees. You just need to identify your requirements and choose a tool that best suits your requirements.

When doing Windows Forensic Analysis, it can be quite overwhelming to see the large amount of data that one needs to collect, assuming you know what you are looking for. In case you don’t know what are you looking for, the entire process becomes twice as hard.

In this article we will be discussing following topics:

1. What is Windows Forensic Analysis?
2. What are Forensic Artifacts?
3. Top Open-Source Tools for Windows Forensic Analysis