Dave Hull

After my previous post, on using uid and gid distributions to spot malicious code on *nix file systems, I took to working on some code to convert *nix "modes" (The Sleuth Kit bodyfile refers to file type and permission information as mode) from fls bodyfiles to their octal representations and then...

On Unix and Linux systems each file has a user id and a group id, "uid" and "gid" respectively, showing the file's owner and group. On most *nix systems files in system directories are "uid" and "gid" root, which is represented by the numeric "uid" and "gid" value of 0, see the sample listing...

In my previous post, Atemporal time line analysis in digital forensics, I talked about using the inodes of a known piece of attacker code as a pivot point to discover previously unknown attacker code on a system. In this post, I want to point out another interesting thing about these inodes. Recall...

As incident responders we often find that attackers compromise one host in a network and then pivot to others. In digital forensic investigations involving intrusions, we can do our own pivoting from one piece of evidence to another. On October 19th, I had the good fortune to speak at SECTor about...

A few days ago I wrote a post about applying the principle of least frequent occurrence to string searches in forensics. This post will discuss how long that process may take and at the end, will show some significant ways to speed up the process. In the previous post I used the following compound...

My phone rang. It was a small business owner looking for some help. He had a system he wanted me to take a look at, but was light on specifics. I asked to speak to his IT person. He laughed and said he was the IT person and that he knew next to nothing about computers. An hour later I was sitting...