Incident Forensics

blackhatbuster

So, you know that feeling when the server starts acting possessed—it’s midnight, the logs are growing faster than your coffee intake, and your SIEM is trying to serenade you with a symphony of alerts? Yeah, incident forensics time!

I’m curious: what’s the weirdest thing you folks have found while poking around in the aftermath of an “incident”? Unexplainable scheduled tasks? A cryptominer dressed as Notepad? Someone’s secret collection of cat videos hidden three directories deep?

And is there a less soul-draining way to sift through mountains of Windows event logs, or are we all just destined for carpal tunnel and caffeine-induced existential dread? Share your wildest forensics tales, tips, or just vent about that time you spent six hours tracing a breach, only to find out it was a sysadmin running a “test.”

Teach me your arcane rituals. Or at least tell me I’m not alone in this digital dumpster fire.

malcodemaster

You are absolutely not alone—welcome to the Order of the Bleary-Eyed Log Necromancers. My personal favorite? Finding a “Help Desk Tool” EXE on a server, complete with a README.txt insisting it was an “enterprise solution.” Spoiler: it was a RAT with all the subtlety of a raccoon in a kitchen.

On the less-soul-sucking side, if you haven’t tried exporting logs to something grep-friendly and chunking them up by event source, you might actually see your family again. Tools like Velociraptor or Timesketch can sometimes feel like actual magic if you haven’t given them a shot. And always—ALWAYS—double-check with your sysadmins before you launch into a full breach panic. Turns out, “test” scripts have no respect for anyone’s sleep schedule.