One of the first things attackers attempt to accomplish on a compromised system is to establish persistence. Unless you are dealing with a denial of service attack, most other attacker goals are centered on maintaining the degree of control over a compromise system in order to use system resources for things like cryptomining or to maintain a foothold to further an attack strategy. This week I am going to talk about a fast triage methodology for persistence, which is one of the first triage strategies I normally recommend for a compromise assessment. Because I am focusing on a fast triage methodology I am going to focus on the artifacts most examiners will have readily at hand and how to make the most of them during the initial pass.

This week I’m covering the Master file table as a core forensic artifact for Windows investigations. This artifact has value is both a primary and secondary artifact and offers opportunity to decode evidence in a number of different situations. In this episode I’m covering the forensic basics, some use cases and tools you can use to bring the value of the artifact to its full potential.

This week of talking malware fast triage. These are the techniques that are short of malware reverse engineering and allow analysts to identify malware and also get a sense of what it is does. This is a necessary skill set for all DFIR professionals as you typically deal with malware and you need a way to do some basic forensics on it for context to advance your investigation. This is going to be a two-part episode where I first go over the foundational information you need to have four common malware triage tasks and the second part will go over specific methods, tools, and indicators for different types of artifacts.

This week of talking malware fast triage. These are the techniques that are short of malware reverse engineering and allow analysts to identify malware and also get a sense of what it is does. This is a necessary skill set for all DFIR professionals as you typically deal with malware and you need a way to do some basic forensics on it for context to advance your investigation. This is going to be a two-part episode where I first go over the foundational information you need to have four common malware triage tasks and the second part will go over specific methods, tools, and indicators for different types of artifacts.

This week I’m talking about SRUM, a Windows artifact that you don’t hear that much about. It has a lot of great potential as evidence and it is something worth the time to check it out and see how it fits into your daily DFIR work.

This week is some thoughts on live evidence integrity. Years ago evidence validation was fairly standard with few exceptions. Nowadays it’s more of a challenge when considering live evidence collections either on scene, remotely or even in lab environments where physical level access to your evidence is becoming more the exception. It is something that needs to be part of your collection process as it may impact the reliability of your results. 

This week I will talk about investigating data spill cases involving exposed URLs. This is a typical privacy investigation many incident response teams handle and I thought it would be useful to go over some standard guidelines for handling such cases. To be effective with these investigations you need to know how to determine liability and responsibility, a little Google foo, and a number of odds and ends concerning mitigation, containment and remediation strategies depending on what you are dealing with.

This week I’m going to cover detecting lateral movement using Windows event logs. This is not the Windows fast triage method I covered in previous episodes. This is more in-depth and focuses on specific attack tools and strategies seen in actual cases. Going into this level of detail is beyond the scope of a typical episode, however there is some research that has very granular details on the tools and methods you can use. I’ll have that coming up right after this.

This week is a back to basics episode where I am going to cover Windows shellbags. This is a core Windows artifact that gets included in pretty much most every file use and knowledge investigation or any investigation where you’re looking to tie a specific account to directory access activity. Like most Windows artifacts you must know how user interaction affects the artifact in order to properly interpreted it as evidence. You must also be aware of any caveats or pitfalls that may affect your evidence. Spoiler alert, there is a huge one associated with Windows shellbags that I’ll cover at the end of the episode-it’s nothing new but if you’re unfamiliar with it you definitely need to know about it.

This week I am talking about a program language called rust and the advantages it has for DFIR analyst. I’m also covering Chainsaw, a toolset that you can use for Windows event log analysis.

This week it’s back to basics with a Windows artifact for tracking program execution. I’m covering the user assist key which is a mainstay for both live triage and dead box forensics. This artifact is useful for profiling system usage, identifying malware, and general file use and knowledge applications. There are some caveats you need to be aware of and in this episode I’m covering  five different experiments to document the effects that different types of user activity had on the artifact. If you want to better understand this artifact and how to work with it stay tuned.

This week I am covering how different common protocols are secured in the cloud. Part of your effectiveness as a security analyst is your knowledge and understanding of how environments work in a typical scenario. I know that all environments are different but there is some foundational knowledge that you can learn that will be useful no matter what environment you’re working. My goal with this episode is to provide you with a better understanding of how insecure protocols are handled in cloud environments.

This we can talk about Arthir, an open source platform for windows incident response and threat hunting.

This week Max Lamothe-Brassard talks about the future of cyber security.

This week is a back to basic episode featuring Shimcache and Amcache. Learn what they are, why they are important to many investigations and the pitfalls to avoid.

This week is about Cloud Network Security Services.

This week we continue with the Windows fast triage series and talk about data spoliation detection.

This week is about cloud network segmentation. Network segmentation has security advantages, and that’s regardless of whether or not security is the intention. There are some big differences between traditional on-prem network segmentation and cloud infrastructure segmentation. As a DFIR practitioner, knowing the difference is vital for your incident response preparedness. This week I will break it down from a DFIR point of view and provide some necessary insight that will help you better structure your investigations involving cloud assets.

This week I cover insider threat, which is sort of a gray area between traditional investigations and DFIR investigations. 

This week I’m talking about identity access controls commonly encountered in cloud environments. These come up during DFIR investigations and high-level awareness, at the least, is necessary for analysts in order to be effective during investigations. These are the things that may be part of root cause, part of the attack escalation, or part of mitigation will remediation. This week all cover the basics to help with your incident response preparedness.

This week is my advice for conducting a career critique as well as to plan for the future - or at least for 2022. I do this episode every year at this time with the intention of helping newer analysts maximize their efforts to achieve the desired career goals in both the short term and long term.

This week we continue with the Windows fast triage series and talk about lateral movement evidence that may be found in DC records.

This week is a continuation of the threats to cloud computing miniseries. We are stepping through the top 11 threats to cloud computing as identified by the Cloud Security alliance. When you are protecting cloud assets or investigating breaches of cloud assets, there is a lot to keep in mind. You must remember the standard security infrastructure, the new cloud infrastructure as well as any changes to the standard infrastructure that could be affected for your investigation. The top 11 threats to cloud computing help identify where you, as an analyst, should prioritize your time both as a starting point and how you use your limited time for continuing education.

This week I review a great method to detect file poisoning on Linux using all native commands.

This week SUMURI's Steve Whalen (a.k.a. 'MacBoy') talks Mac artifacts