Forensics

Wanted Alive peels back a phishing .hta attachment through nested JScript, obfuscated VBScript, and two chained PowerShell downloaders to reach a flag served over HTTP.

John Grunewald was deleting some old accounting documents when he accidentally deleted an important document he had been working on. He panicked and downloaded software to recover the document, but after installing it, his PC started behaving strangely. Feeling even more demoralised and depressed, he alerted the IT department, who immediately locked down the workstation and recovered some forensic evidence. Now it is up to you to analyze the evidence to understand what happened on John’s workstation.

We have been hot on the trail for a political dissident. They jump from café to café using the Wi-Fi making it hard to nab them. During one of their trips, they unknowingly sat next to one of our agents and we captured them with their laptop on. We need to know where they have been and what they have been doing. Analyze the KAPE output and see if you can get us some answers.

An accounting team receives an urgent payment request from a known vendor. The email appears legitimate but contains a suspicious link and a .zip attachment hiding malware. Your task is to analyze the email headers, and uncover the attacker’s scheme.

A recent anomaly has been detected in our network traffic, suggesting a potential breach. Our team suspects that an unauthorized entity has infiltrated our systems and accessed confidential company data. Your mission is to unravel this mystery, understand the breach, and determine the extent of the compromised data.

With help from D.I. Lestrade, Holmes acquires logs from a compromised MSP connected to the city’s financial core. The MSP’s AI servicedesk bot looks to have been manipulated into leaking remote access keys - an old trick of Moriarty’s.

LeStrade passes a disk image artifacts to Watson. It’s one of the identified breach points, now showing abnormal CPU activity and anomalies in process logs.

Reminiscent carves a malicious resume.pdf.lnk out of a Windows 7 memory dump with Volatility, then peels back two offset-read, base64-chained PowerShell stagers — the second an RC4-keyed Empire-style beacon — down to the flag.