Hacking Exposed Computer Forensics Blog

Hello Reader,
                      I've been trying to find more conferences to speak at lately (If you are running a conference let me know) to let more people know about fun forensic artifacts. I've been selected to speak at Derbycon 2.0 but not for a forensic topic this time (though I did submit one). Instead the fine folks at Derbycon like my topic titled 'How to run a successful redteam'. If you've been following the blog you'd know that once a year I lead the national red team for the national collegiate cyber defense competition and have been doing so for 5 years now. We've learned alot on how to build and succeed as a competition red team and I thought it would be a good idea to share what we've learned.

So if you are going to at Derbycon and want to either:
 a) have a beer with me and talk forensics or
b) find out how to be a lethal red team full of 'i love it when a plan comes together' moments

Then I'll see you there! Let me know you read the blog if you don't mind it's always nice to know someone is one the other side of the screen.

Hello Reader!,
                       It's been awhile since we've talked. Things here at G-C have been pretty busy, the legal sector at least appears to be in a full recovery (knock on wood). While I haven't had time to write up a full blog post on some of the new things we've found over the summer, I did want to take the time to show you how our NTFS $logfile parser is coming. For those of you who attended my CEIC session on 'anti-anti forensics' or who downloaded the labs I posted afterwords you know that we had a rough parser and tests to recover the names of wiped files before.

I'm happy to say we've come a long way since then. The initial proof of concept parser was shown to validate the artifact and divide up the pieces into something we could then further understand. We now have a parser, that is still in development, that can go even further creating CSVs of human readable data extracted from those $logfile segments.

What does that mean? Well it means:
1. We can recover the names of deleted files and their metadata, even if its been purged out of the MFT. This includes the metadata associated with the file (directory, creation, modification and acess times).
2. We can recover the complete rename operation showing cleanly which file became which file. Including parsing out the directory, creation, modification and access times before and after the operation. This essentially will allow you to undo what a wiper has done (except for recover the contents of the file itself).
3. We can determine if files were written to other drives, and an approximation of how many. (This is not in the current version of the parsers and will require ist own blog post).
4. We can recover the original metadata of a file when it was created
5. We should be able to recover timestamps that have been altered

It's all written in perl (woo!) and we are going to release the source and documentation as soon as its ready (tm). In the mean time check out this awesome screenshot showing the parser recovering the metadata from 22 files that were wiped with eraser:




If you are need of this tool for a case immediately drop me a line and I'll see what we can do to help you out!