Archive
Incident teardowns, detection engineering, reverse engineering and network forensics.
What a given artifact proves, what it only suggests, and what it cannot tell you at all. Registry, event logs, the filesystem and the journals underneath them.
Prefetch is the best execution evidence most Windows workstations keep by default. What is inside a .pf file, how to read the eight run times, why two files for one program can be normal or a finding, and where it runs out.
The Security log records events. An investigation needs sessions. The logon ID is the join between them: how to follow one from the logon through every process it started to the logoff, and the three places the thread breaks.
Data staged with an archiver and sent out with a renamed copy of a legitimate sync tool. Identify the binary from one field, reconstruct what was taken from a command line, and be exact about what endpoint telemetry cannot tell you about volume.
A password spray that stayed under the lockout threshold and never produced a failed-logon event on the server it was aimed at. Find where the failures were recorded, identify the account that fell, and explain why the dashboard showed nothing.
Remote execution over the admin share, reconstructed from the target. Tie four events in three logs into one action, work back to the host it came from, and handle the version where the service is not called PSEXESVC.
Event 4624 has more than twenty fields and most triage reads two of them. The five that change the conclusion, what each one is really recording, and the values that catch people out.
Most PowerShell alerts are administration. Five questions, ordered so the cheapest one that can close the alert comes first, with the answer that means stop and the answer that means keep going.
A burst of Kerberos service ticket requests from one workstation, every one of them legitimate as far as the domain controller is concerned. Find what makes the cluster abnormal, separate it from a legacy application, and say what the log cannot tell you.
An LSASS dump taken with a DLL that ships in System32, called by ordinal so the obvious rule misses it. Work out which process touched LSASS, which access mask matters, and whose credentials you now have to assume are gone.
A trusted software update that carried a backdoor, worked as a case. Signing proved the build was the vendor's; it proved nothing about what was in it. Eight questions on detection, scope and the uncomfortable part, which is that nothing your endpoint controls were watching for was wrong.
Chrome opens a pipe that Cobalt Strike also opens. Chrome's updater reads LSASS. Discord ships a signed binary that launches other binaries. Six alerts that fire on normal software, each with the benign explanation and the discriminator, and a count of how often the public rulebase admits any of this.
Timestomping is a decision, not an accident, and the decision is visible. NTFS keeps eight timestamps per file and the ordinary Windows API writes four of them. What the other four say about the tool the operator chose, the checklist they were working from, and where they stopped.
The first lab for a machine of your own. You create the evidence yourself, delete a file from it, and then recover the file you deleted, which is the only way to be certain the recovery worked.
Every other lab here asks for a virtual machine. This one asks for a terminal. Pre-recorded event logs, a cross-platform parser, and the same reasoning, on whatever laptop you already have.
A constructed intrusion written as a DFIR report. You get the same artifacts an analyst gets on day one, in the order they arrive, and you build the timeline yourself. The company is fictional; the techniques, event IDs and analytic reasoning are not.
Plant a scheduled task with Atomic Red Team, then find it four ways and work out which one survives an attacker who names their task properly. Closes the loop on the persistence you found on the domain controller in the Northwind case.
WMI event subscriptions run code on a condition you choose, survive reboots, live nowhere in the filesystem, and log nothing by default. The last of the persistence series, and the one that changes how you think about the other three.
A first investigation for anyone who has read about persistence but never gone looking for it. You will plant a Run key with Atomic Red Team, then find it three different ways and work out which of the three you would actually trust in production.
Windows services run as SYSTEM and start before anyone logs in, which makes them the most valuable persistence on the box and the hardest to spot among the two hundred already there. Part three of the persistence series.
A lab reconstruction of a user-level persistence case, and why the Run key timestamp is the least useful thing in the artifact set.
