Since THOR and THOR Lite are tools written for digital forensic experts, they can be difficult to use. There is often a steep learning curve in the beginning. We'd like to help new users pass these first steps in a playful way by providing a TryHackMe challenge in...
The analysis of Antivirus events can be a tedious task in big organizations with hundreds of events per day. Usually security teams fall back to a mode of operation in which they only analyze events in which a cleanup process has failed or something went wrong. This...
Download the Antivirus Event Analysis Cheat Sheet version 1.8.1 here.
The "Web Proxy Event Analysis Cheat Sheet" can help SOCs and security analysts classify proxy events (blocks, alerts) and is based on my ideas and many ideas from experts that helped me collect detection ideas for this document. You can download version 1.0 here. We...
During the last four years, I was engaged on incident response teams for several large advanced persistent threat (APT) cases involving different German corporations. In this time, we have developed methods and tools to detect compromised systems, while also planning...
It has been a while since I wrote "How to Write Simple but Sound Yara Rules - Part 2". Since then I changed my rule creation method to generate more versatile rules that can also be used for in-memory detection. Furthermore new features were added to yarGen and...
YARA is an awesome tool especially for incident responders and forensic investigators. In my scanners I use YARA for anomaly detection on files. I already created some articles on "Detecting System File Anomalies with YARA" which focus on the expected contents of...
Months ago I wrote a blog article on "How to write simple but sound Yara rules". Since then the mentioned techniques and tools have improved. I'd like to give you a brief update on certain Yara features that I frequently use and tools that I use to generate and test...
Today most security teams have access to a lot of different information sources. On the one hand they collect log data from different sources and try to correlate them in a useful way in so-called SIEM systems. On the other hand they receive threat information from...
SysInternals Sysmon is a powerful tool especially when it comes to anomaly detection. I recently developed a method to detect system file manipulations, which I would like to share with you. We know how to track processes with the standard Windows audit policy option...
People often ask me, why we changed the name of our scanner from "IOC" to "APT" scanner and if we did that only for marketing reasons. But don't worry, this blog post is just as little a sales pitch as it is an attempt to create a new product class. I'll show you why...
During the last 2 years I wrote approximately 2000 Yara rules based on samples found during our incident response investigations. A lot of security professionals noticed that Yara provides an easy and effective way to write custom rules based on strings or byte...