dissect

Dissect is a digital forensics & incident response framework and toolset that allows you to quickly access and analyse forensic artifacts from various disk and file formats, developed by Fox-IT (part of NCC Group).

What is Dissect?

Dissect is an incident response framework built from various parsers and implementations of file formats. Tying this all together, Dissect allows you to work with tools named target-query and target-shell to quickly gain access to forensic artifacts, such as Runkeys, Prefetch files, and Windows Event Logs, just to name a few!

Singular approach

And the best thing: all in a singular way, regardless of underlying container (E01, VMDK, QCoW), filesystem (NTFS, ExtFS, FFS), or Operating System (Windows, Linux, ESXi) structure/combination. You no longer have to bother extracting files from your forensic container, mount them (in case of VMDKs and such), retrieve the MFT, and parse it using a separate tool, to finally create a timeline to analyse. This is all handled under the hood by Dissect in a user-friendly manner.

If we take the example above, you can start analysing parsed MFT entries by just using a command like target-query -f mft <PATH_TO_YOUR_IMAGE>!

Create a lightweight container using Acquire

Dissect also provides you with a tool called acquire. You can deploy this tool on endpoint(s) to create a lightweight container of these machine(s). What is convenient as well, is that you can deploy acquire on a hypervisor to quickly create lightweight containers of all the (running) virtual machines on there! All without having to worry about file-locks. These lightweight containers can then be analysed using the tools like target-query and target-shell, but feel free to use other tools as well.

A modular setup

Dissect is made with a modular approach in mind. This means that each individual project can be used on its own (or in combination) to create a completely new tool for your engagement or future use!

Changelog v3.8.1

• Fixed issue in registry plugin that crashed the plugin if key() got called by itself.
• Add a OSPlugin for citrix netscalers

Install & Use

Copyright © 2023, Fox-IT part of NCC Group