ArtifactCollector : Unlocking Digital Forensics – A Comprehensive Guide

The artifactcollector project provides a software that collects forensic artifacts on systems. These artifacts can be used in forensic investigations to understand attacker behavior on compromised computers.

Features

The artifactcollector offers the following features

• ️Runs on Windows, Linux and macOS
• Can extract files, directories, registry entries, command and WMI output
• Uses the configurable and extensible Forensics Artifacts
• Creates a forensicstore as structured output
• It’s open source
• Free for everyone (including commercial use)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/forensicanalysis/artifactcollector
cd artifactcollector
go install .

Get Artifacts And Process Forensicstores

If you want to extract the raw artifacts or process the collected data have a look.

Build Your Own Artifactcollector

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/forensicanalysis/artifactcollector.
2. Run go generate to download all artifacts.
3. Add artifact definition yaml files as needed in pack/artifacts. Do not edit the artifact definitions, as they will be overwritten.
4. Edit pack/ac.yaml and add the artifacts you want to collect.
5. Run go generate. This might yield some errors or problems in your artifacts.
6. On windows you can move the syso into the root folder (e.g. cp resources\artifactcollector.syso .) to enable the icon for the executable and the UAC popup.
7. Run go build . to generates an executable.

Embed Binaries

Binaries can be added to pack/bin and than included into the artifactcollector in the go generate step. Additionally a corresponding COMMAND artifact like the following is required.

name: Autoruns
sources:
- type: COMMAND
  attributes:
    cmd: autorunsc.exe
    args: ["-x"]
supported_os: [Windows]

Currently the output to stdout and stderr is saved, but generated files are not collected.

Cross Compilation

Cross compilation is a bit more difficult, as a cross compiler like MinGW is required by CGO.

Example cross compilation for Windows:

CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 go build .
CGO_ENABLED=1 CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build .