A client recently called me with some bad news.  "Our CFO's laptop was just stolen!" he told me - "What should we do?".  My immediate response (and out-loud I'm afraid) was "Fire up the Delorean, go back in time and encrypt the drive".  Needless to say, he wasn't keen on my response, even though I offered up a spare flux capacitor - maybe his Delorean was in the shop.

His response actually suprised me "We're actually in the middle of a WDE (WHole Disk Encryption) project.  The CFO's laptop was scheduled for next week (delayed at his request)".  But no matter how good that project is, it wasn't helping us today.
This client is under both NERC and PCI regulation, so I asked the obvious "did he have any financial data on his machine?  Do you need to disclose the theft as a breach?".  The response was an immediate "he says not".  Since the answer wasn't a definite "no", I asked the obvious - "Do you believe him?"  The answering pause really said it all.

The challenge we then had was to prove to the CFO, one way or the other, that sensitive data did or did not exist on the laptop.  Having just taken SANS FOR408, I know for a fact that even if he didn't save anything to the laptop, the presense of files and either parts of or full files are strewn across the file structure, registry and a kazzilion other locations on the machine.

So the scenario and a fun forensics question to end your week is:
A Windows 7 laptop, fully patched with Office 2010 installed
The corporate browser is IE10, but Firefox is also installed

Using our comment form, share where you would look for sensitive files, fragments of files or indicators of the presence of files.
Passwords, links and other sensitive information are all in play.
Be sure to include the tool or method you would use to find any evidence - duplicate "findings" are perfectly fine, as long as the tool or method is different.

Let's assume that the user didn't download anything to the "downloads" directory, and didn't have "I don't know where I saved that file" files strewn across his local profile and drive (even though that's extremely likely)

I'll update this story in a week or so with how the story played out, and how we made the point to the CFO.

Happy forensicating everyone!
 

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Rob VandenBrink
Metafore