Deep Inspection Tools

So far, we have discussed tools that perform a cursory analysis of files based on minimal knowledge of those files’ internal structure. We have also seen tools capable of extracting specific pieces of data from files based on very detailed knowledge of a file’s structure. In this section we discuss tools designed to extract specific types of information independently of the type of file being analyzed.

strings

It is occasionally useful to ask more generic questions regarding file content, questions that don’t necessarily require any specific knowledge of a file’s structure. One such question is “Does this file contain any embedded strings?” Of course, we must first answer the question “What exactly constitutes a string?” Let’s ...

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