Automation of VHDX Investigations
In large-scale environments using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platforms like Citrix, incident responders can find it challenging to identify the initial point of compromise. While some setups use non-persistent sessions with golden image restoration, many environments persist user data on remote file servers. Instead of storing profiles as standard folders, it is common to find them stored within Virtual Hard Disk (VHDX) files.These VHDX files often contain valuable forensic artefacts such as NTUSER.DAT hives and application execution traces. Investigating them manually, however, becomes inefficient at scale, especially when dealing with thousands of user profiles.This blog post introduces a method for automating forensic analysis of VHDX-based user profiles using Velociraptor, our preferred DFIR tool. The goal is to scale investigations efficiently and reliably without compromising forensic integrity.
2025-09-26
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2435 words
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12 minutes
Attacking EDRs Part 4: Fuzzing Defender's Scanning and Emulation Engine (mpengine.dll)
Multiple out-of-bounds read and null dereference bugs were identified in Microsoft Defender by using Snapshot Fuzzing with WTF and kAFL/NYX. The bugs can be used to crash the main Defender process as soon as the file is scanned. Most are unpatched, but none appear exploitable for code execution.
2025-05-23
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3901 words
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20 minutes
Attacking EDRs Part 3: One Bug to Stop them all
This post describes a DoS vulnerability affecting most Windows EDR agents. The vulnerability is an issue in the handling of already existing objects in the Object Manager's namespace.
2025-02-24
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3422 words
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17 minutes
Attacking EDRs Part 2: Driver Analysis Results
The second part describes the process and results of the EDR driver security analysis of Palo Alto Cortex using manual analysis and Sophos Intercept X using snapshot fuzzing. Only minor vulnerabilities were identified (CVE-2024-5905).
2025-02-17
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3599 words
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18 minutes
Attacking EDRs Part 1: Intro & Security Analysis of EDR Drivers
This article gives an overview of the attack surface of EDR software and describes the process to search for attack surface on EDR drivers from a low-privileged user.
2025-02-10
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2340 words
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12 minutes
Tear Down The Castle - Part 2
To gain insight into common issues and patterns of misconfiguration, we analyzed 250 PingCastle reports collected from Incident Response cases and Compromise Assessments.
2025-01-23
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1514 words
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8 minutes
Tear Down The Castle - Part 1
To gain insight into common issues and patterns of misconfiguration, we analyzed 250 PingCastle reports collected from Incident Response cases and Compromise Assessments.
2025-01-19
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1814 words
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9 minutes
Breaking CAPTCHAs with image recognition
Mario Bischof
This article explains how image recognition services can be used to bypass (i.e. auto-solve) classical alphanumeric CAPTCHAs.
2023-09-09
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1339 words
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7 minutes
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