Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This paper describes procedures for conducting forensic examinations of Apple Macs running Mac OS X. The target disk mode is used to create a forensic duplicate of a Mac hard drive and preview it. Procedures are discussed for recovering evidence from allocated space, unallocated space, slack space and virtual memory. Furthermore, procedures are described for recovering trace evidence from Mac OS X default email, web browser and instant messaging applications, as well as evidence pertaining to commands executed from a terminal.

Secure deletion programs purport to permanently erase files from digital media. These programs are used by businesses and individuals to remove sensitive information from media, and by criminals to remove evidence of the tools or fruits of illegal activities. This paper focuses on the trace evidence left by secure deletion programs. In particular, five Windows-based secure deletion programs are tested to determine if they leave identifiable signatures after deleting a file. The results show that the majority of the programs leave identifiable signatures. Moreover, some of the programs do not completely erase file metadata, which enables forensic investigators to extract …