Tokiade

The employee cleared the browser history before handing the Windows laptop to the investigation team. At first glance, there was nothing useful left. No suspicious download entry. No obvious website in the browser. Then we checked the Windows DNS client cache. Windows temporarily stores recently resolved domain names so it does not have to query a DNS server repeatedly. In the image, the cache still contains sync-gateway.example.net, its A record, the resolved IP address and the remaining time-to-live. This does not prove that the employee visited the domain in a browser. Another application, background service or security tool could have requested the same DNS resolution. The cache also does not identify exactly when the lookup occurred. But it gives an investigator a valuable lead that can be correlated with firewall logs, proxy records, process telemetry and DNS server logs. Browser history belongs to the browser. DNS evidence can exist elsewhere in the operating system. Useful PowerShell command: Get-DnsClientCache