Welcome back, cyberwarriors!

During pentests, we often run into EDRs and antiviruses protecting endpoints. These mainly stop you from dumping hashes and running malware on the hosts. Although they’re often good at what they do, they still have flaws that make them vulnerable to chokers and killers that can terminate their process.

If you’ve ever tried dumping LSASS or extracting SAM and SYSTEM hives, you’ve seen the EDR block your attempts. There are legit ways to do it, for instance with reg.exe or Task Manager, but these have been abused for so long that they can’t be relied on anymore. Despite all that, dumping hashes is really easy if you do a complete memory dump with forensics tools and pull the hashes from the dump. These tools don’t just target LSASS, they do a full memory dump that includes everything. That’s what’s supposed to happen during incident response procedures, so nothing gets flagged and it won’t, because that would interfere with security work.

Today we want to show you how to use FTK Imager with DeadMatter to extract different credentials. FTK Imager needs a GUI, so if you don’t have it try running DumpIt from CLI instead. It’s available on GitHub.

What is DeadMatter

DeadMatter is written in C# and its whole job is to extract sensitive information from memory dumps. It scans raw data to find patterns associated with credentials, that way you can recover them even when the memory dump is incomplete or the format isn’t predictable. The tool is also lightweight and isn’t flagged by AV/EDR, so you can extract hashes on the victim machine directly without transferring these huge files around. The results include NTLM hashes, DPAPI keys, and other artifacts tied to logon sessions. The tool was first presented at Black Hat USA 2025.

Compiling DeadMatter

The repository for DeadMatter doesn’t include a precompiled binary and you will need to build it yourself. You can do it with Visual Studio or using the .NET Framework.

If you choose to compile it manually, you can clone the repository and execute the build process from PowerShell.

PS > dotnet build -c release

Once it completes, Deadmatter.exe will be in the bin\Release directory. The build process usually completes without issues, if you have the required .NET components installed correctly.

If you prefer not to compile the tool yourself or run into problems during the process, you can use our compiled version to save time. We uploaded the compiled executable to our GitHub.

Capturing RAM

Before moving forward, it is important to understand that this technique relies on the ability to extract credentials from memory, which is significantly affected by the state of Credential Guard. If Credential Guard is enabled, credentials are isolated and you won’t be able to access them.

But in many environments with Windows 10 Pro or Windows Server versions prior to 2025, Credential Guard is often disabled. These systems are still widely used across corporate infrastructures. Newer deployments usually have it enabled by default now. To avoid unnecessary effort you can check the status of Credential Guard before proceeding.

PS > Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_DeviceGuard -Namespace root\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceGuard

If it shows that it’s disabled {0}, you can proceed with memory acquisition.

We used FTK Imager to capture RAM. You just need open the app and click “Capture Memory”

Then you specify the name and the destination path. The default settings are enough.

Our next step is exfiltration. Modern systems often have large amounts of RAM. Servers commonly have 16-32GB as a baseline, and systems that have Microsoft Exchange may have significantly more. A raw memory dump of this size can be quite large, but you can compress it with 7z. It’s possible to reduce it from 32GB down to 12 GB, if you don’t want to run DeadMatter directly on the compromised system.

Extracting Credentials

Once the dump is transferred, you can extract creds. To process a full memory dump in raw format using structured parsing and carving, run this:

PS > .\Deadmatter.exe -f memory_dump.raw

The output is quite detailed. As you scroll through the results, you will find different credentials associated with active or recently active sessions on the system.

If you want to rely purely on carving methods, you can ignore structured parsing and search the raw data directly:

PS > .\Deadmatter.exe -f memory_dump.raw -m carve

When you work with a minidump file and want to use a specific parsing method, you can define the technique and the Windows version:

PS > .\Deadmatter.exe -f lsass.dmp -m mimikatz -w WIN_10_1507 -v

There are also more advanced options available. For instance, you can extract both credentials and DPAPI keys with additional brute-forcing to find initialization vectors within the data:

PS > .\Deadmatter.exe -f memory_dump.raw -b -d

Try different methods and see if you can find more information. 

Defense

To protect yourself from these attacks, make sure Credential Guard is on. It’ll make the credentials inaccessible. It’s also a good idea to monitor which forensic tools are being used. Ideally, keep a whitelist of approved tools that way you can spot someone trying to do a dump without authorization.

Summary

While defenders should have a red team mindset, hackers should have a blue team mindset to know how things work on the other side. Digital forensics is a great field and applies to both sides. Extracting credentials from systems is just one of its uses, more advanced knowledge can help you with behavior analysis and evasion.

If you want to learn more about Digital Forensics, we have training for beginners and for those who want to advance their skills in it.

The post Digital Forensics: Extracting Credentials with DeadMatter first appeared on Hackers Arise.