Welcome back, dear investigators!

Our main concern in cybersecurity is protecting systems and recovering from cyberattacks quickly. There are different tools out there built for this, and they keep evolving. Our job is to find what fits best in our environment and stick to the best practices laid out by NIST and ISO.

Today we’ll look at Live-Forensicator, a live response toolkit. The tool supports AI integration to process your findings more efficiently, which is a good thing since many of you know how tedious forensic analysis work can be. It’s optional though, and you can always rely on your own knowledge to verify findings.

Setting Up

Let’s download the archive with scripts and see what’s inside. You can find it here.

Live-Forensicator works on Windows, Linux, and macOS. We’ll be testing it on Windows here. Keep in mind, the tool gets flagged by AV because WinPmem, admin PS, and hash walks look suspicious. Use it only if you think it’s appropriate for your environment, or fall back to other tools since we’ve covered many of them on our website.

PS > powershell -ep bypass Forensicator.ps1 -USAGE

Running Scans

Let’s start with some general scans.

You can launch it without any flags and the tool will ask for details after you start it.

PS > .\Forensicator.ps1 

Or give it some case details upfront. They include the operator name, case ID, location and the device name.

PS > .\Forensicator.ps1 -OPERATOR "Jane Doe" -CASE "IR-2026-001" -TITLE "Workstation triage" -LOCATION "Toronto" -DEVICE "LAPTOP-042"

It’ll take some time to go through all the steps. You’ll see the progress on screen.

When the script finishes, the results get saved in the current folder inside a new directory. Go to reports and open index.html.

Here’s the overview page. You can scroll down and jump to different sections of the report.

Below is the Event Log summary with events sorted by category. We see that accounts successfully logged on (Event ID 4624), then someone looked up what groups certain users belong to (Event ID 4798) and the members of security groups were listed (Event ID 4799). Event ID 4688 logs process creation.

You also get a summary to assess the risks quickly. In our case it was high and the tool explained why.

Forensicator AI

AI is off by default. When it’s enabled, you get a plain language explanation of the results. For AI to work, you need Ollama running. The model can run locally or sit on a separate host accessible to other machines. Mistral AI models can be used for this work.

# Install Ollama (https://ollama.com) and pull a model
PS > ollama pull mistral:7b-instruct

Then edit the config.json file.

"ai": {
  "enabled": true,
  "provider": "ollama",
  "base_url": "http://localhost:11434",
  "model": "mistral:7b-instruct"
}

There’s no -AI flag. The script reads config.json at startup. When AI is on, each finding gets sent to the model after it’s built. If the model is down, the collection still finishes and that row just has no verdict. In the report, open a finding and use the tooltip labeled AI Analysis. Windows also builds an Investigation Summary with a risk score, a rough timeline, and next steps. This is just a briefing, so don’t treat it as the final verdict. Also, keep in mind that AI makes the run a lot slower since every finding is a real model call.

Here are some screenshots of AI analysis.

Summary

During an incident response time is of the essence, so swiftly scanning your hosts for signs of compromise will save you time. There are different situations and cases that require certain approaches, that’s why knowing how to work with different forensics tools is important. Having AI process your analysis results can be helpful, but it might take some time, unless you have a good GPU for it.

If you’re just getting started in forensics, we recommend our Digital Forensics training, where Master OTW walks you through the techniques to find evidence of criminal activity on a computer or network.

The post Digital Forensics: Analyzing Systems with Live-Forensicator first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Welcome back, cyberwarriors!

The article on DeadMatter was really popular and relevant for many of you. DeadMatter works with LSASS and finds artifacts related to active or recently active sessions. But sometimes you need SAM hashes during a pentest.

Today we’re using 7z to find and pull the hives. It’s very common to find and it has raw disk access to fetch what we need without triggering the EDR. You can basically call it a living off the land technique due to its widespread presence. There are other ways to extract hashes, but most of them are well known and monitored. Some hackers rely on VSS and it works fine in some environments, but detecting VSS abuse isn’t hard. It’s a beginner level of complexity. VSS leaves very specific traces in the logs when you use it. Native Windows binaries get blocked outright and finding forensic tools already sitting on an endpoint is uncommon.

Credit where it’s due, Jonas Lyk shared this approach.

Extracting Hives

To make it work, you need to start 7z as Administrator, otherwise it just fails. Then you type \\.\ in the path bar and it’ll show you the drives.

Here we need PhysicalDrive0. You can’t copy it off the C:\ drive, because it’s locked by the system.

Inside you’ll see the partitions on the physical drive. Usually 1.ntfs has the structure of your C:\. 0.ntfs has $MFT, $J and the other files you want for a deeper dive. 

System hives live in Windows\System32\config

Select the hives you need and copy them to a folder. We’re only pulling SAM and SYSTEM here, but you can get SOFTWARE, $MFT, $J, and NTUSER.DAT if you’re doing behavioral analysis. We covered that in our article showing how much you can find out about a user after a compromise. Behavioral analysis is also useful in pentesting. NTUSER.DAT shows a lot about how the sysadmins use their machines.

File size shows the hives aren’t empty. Now we can move them to Kali and extract the hashes.

kali > impacket-secretsdump -sam SAM -system SYSTEM LOCAL

We got all the local user hashes. If LAPS isn’t enabled (in a lot of environments it isn’t), there’s a good chance the admin hash is identical across many machines. Some admins don’t even know LAPS exists, others are scared to turn it on because they’re not in control of the password rotation. Either way, SAM alone can be enough to compromise the whole domain.

Terminal

This approach hits a wall in the terminal. 7z can only parse physical disks and NTFS partitions through the File Manager GUI. The CLI version still can’t open nested partitions and throws an error every time. So the GUI is the only way you can pull it off.

There are forensics tools that do it in the terminal (AxiomSecret, RawCopy, etc.) but that’s a story for another day.

Summary

Many successful attacks use LOL techniques or signed tools. This approach is creative and 7z is already sitting on plenty of machines. Even if it’s not, bringing it over isn’t suspicious.

It won’t get you LSASS hashes, but the SAM hashes alone can be enough to compromise a company’s entire infrastructure. We showed that in our SCADA article, where the SCADA machine stored cleartext passwords in memory and password reuse helped us with the rest of the infrastructure during the pentest. LAPS isn’t hard to set up and it can close this door, so spend some time learning it.

If you like what we’re doing here and want to get started in Digital Forensics or advance your skills, we recommend our training for both beginners and more experienced students.

The post Digital Forensics: Attacking SAM and Extracting Hashes With 7z first appeared on Hackers Arise.

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.