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During a corporate fraud investigation, analysts examine a workstation where a user attempted to obscure web activity by relying on private browsing features across multiple modern browsers. Although browser-level traces appear limited, investigators identify residual evidence indicating that user-entered queries and browsing fragments persisted beyond the active session lifecycle. From which artifact can investigators most reliably recover this type of residual evidence across multiple browsers?
The correct answer is B because pagefile.sys is one of the most useful cross-browser residual evidence sources when private browsing is used. Research on private browsing repeatedly shows that, even when standard browser artifacts are minimized, remnants of queries, visited content, and browsing fragments can still persist in operating system artifacts such as paging data and memory-related storage. Studies of private mode forensics found that evidence may remain in RAM and disk artifacts even when browser traces are reduced, and this is especially valuable because pagefile.sys is not tied to one specific browser implementation. CHFI v11 includes browser artifact recovery and private browsing analysis under operating system and file artifact examination, so candidates are expected to think beyond obvious browser stores. Cookies and temporary databases are more browser-dependent and may be cleared or limited by private mode. DNS cache can reveal domain resolution history, but it usually does not preserve the richer search-query and browsing-fragment evidence described in the scenario. Therefore, pagefile.sys is the strongest and most reliable source among the listed options.
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