-Unlike most CTF forensics challenges, a real-world computer forensics task would hardly ever involve unraveling a scheme of cleverly encoded bytes, hidden data, mastroshka-like files-within-files, or other such brain-teaser puzzles. One would typically not bust a criminal case by carefully reassembling a corrupted PNG file, revealing a photo of a QR code that decodes to a password for a zip archive containing an NES rom that when played will output the confession. Rather, real-world forensics typically requires that a practictioner find indirect evidence of maliciousness: either the traces of an attacker on a system, or the traces of "insider threat" behavior. Real-world computer forensics is largely about knowing where to find incriminating clues in logs, in memory, in filesystems/registries, and associated file and filesystem metadata. Also, network (packet capture) forensics is more about metadata analysis than content analysis, as most network sessions are TLS-encrypted between endpoints now.
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