Awesome Incident Response

A curated list of tools and resources for security incident response, aimed to help security analysts and DFIR teams.

Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) teams are groups of people in an organization responsible for managing the response to a security incident, including gathering evidence of the incident, remediating its effects, and implementing controls to prevent the incident from recurring in the future.

Contents

• Adversary Emulation
• All in one tools
• Books
• Communities
• Disk Image Creation Tools
• Evidence Collection
• Incident Management
• Linux Distributions
• Linux Evidence Collection
• Log Analysis Tools
• Memory Analysis Tools
• Memory Imaging Tools
• OSX Evidence Collection
• Other lists
• Other tools
• Playbooks
• Process Dump Tools
• Sandboxing/reversing tools
• Timeline tools
• Videos
• Windows Evidence Collection

IR tools Collection

Adversary Emulation

• APTSimulator - Windows Batch script that uses a set of tools and output files to make a system look as if it was compromised.
• Atomic Red Team (ART) - Small and highly portable detection tests mapped to the Mitre ATT&CK Framework.
• AutoTTP - Automated Tactics Techniques & Procedures. Re-running complex sequences manually for regression tests, product evaluations, generate data for researchers.
• Blue Team Training Toolkit (BT3) - Software for defensive security training, which will bring your network analysis training sessions, incident response drills and red team engagements to a new level.
• Caldera - Automated adversary emulation system that performs post-compromise adversarial behavior within Windows Enterprise networks. It generates plans during operation using a planning system and a pre-configured adversary model based on the Adversarial Tactics, Techniques & Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) project.
• DumpsterFire - Modular, menu-driven, cross-platform tool for building repeatable, time-delayed, distributed security events. Easily create custom event chains for Blue Team drills and sensor / alert mapping. Red Teams can create decoy incidents, distractions, and lures to support and scale their operations.
• Metta - Information security preparedness tool to do adversarial simulation.
• Network Flight Simulator - Lightweight utility used to generate malicious network traffic and help security teams to evaluate security controls and network visibility.
• Red Team Automation (RTA) - RTA provides a framework of scripts designed to allow blue teams to test their detection capabilities against malicious tradecraft, modeled after MITRE ATT&CK.
• RedHunt-OS - Virtual machine for adversary emulation and threat hunting.

All in one Tools

• Belkasoft Evidence Center - The toolkit will quickly extract digital evidence from multiple sources by analyzing hard drives, drive images, memory dumps, iOS, Blackberry and Android backups, UFED, JTAG and chip-off dumps.
• CimSweep - Suite of CIM/WMI-based tools that enable the ability to perform incident response and hunting operations remotely across all versions of Windows.
• CIRTkit - CIRTKit is not just a collection of tools, but also a framework to aid in the ongoing unification of Incident Response and Forensics investigation processes.
• Cyber Triage - Cyber Triage remotely collects and analyzes endpoint data to help determine if it is compromised. It’s agentless approach and focus on ease of use and automation allows companies to respond without major infrastructure changes and without a team of forensics experts. Its results are used to decide if the system should be erased or investigated further.
• Doorman - osquery fleet manager that allows remote management of osquery configurations retrieved by nodes. It takes advantage of osquery’s TLS configuration, logger, and distributed read/write endpoints, to give administrators visibility across a fleet of devices with minimal overhead and intrusiveness.
• Falcon Orchestrator - Extendable Windows-based application that provides workflow automation, case management and security response functionality.
• Fleetdm - State of the art host monitoring platform tailored for security experts. Leveraging Facebook’s battle-tested osquery project, Fleetdm delivers continous updates, features and fast answers to big questions.
• GRR Rapid Response - Incident response framework focused on remote live forensics. It consists of a python agent (client) that is installed on target systems, and a python server infrastructure that can manage and talk to the agent. Besides the included Python API client, PowerGRR provides an API client library in PowerShell working on Windows, Linux and macOS for GRR automation and scripting.
• Limacharlie - Endpoint security platform composed of a collection of small projects all working together that gives you a cross-platform (Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS) low-level environment for managing and pushing additional modules into memory to extend its functionality.
• MozDef - Automates the security incident handling process and facilitate the real-time activities of incident handlers.
• nightHawk - Application built for asynchronus forensic data presentation using ElasticSearch as the backend. It’s designed to ingest Redline collections.
• Open Computer Forensics Architecture - Another popular distributed open-source computer forensics framework. This framework was built on Linux platform and uses postgreSQL database for storing data.
• osquery - Easily ask questions about your Linux and macOS infrastructure using a SQL-like query language; the provided incident-response pack helps you detect and respond to breaches.
• Redline - Provides host investigative capabilities to users to find signs of malicious activity through memory and file analysis, and the development of a threat assessment profile.
• The Sleuth Kit & Autopsy - Unix and Windows based tool which helps in forensic analysis of computers. It comes with various tools which helps in digital forensics. These tools help in analyzing disk images, performing in-depth analysis of file systems, and various other things.
• TheHive - Scalable 3-in-1 open source and free solution designed to make life easier for SOCs, CSIRTs, CERTs and any information security practitioner dealing with security incidents that need to be investigated and acted upon swiftly.
• X-Ways Forensics - Forensics tool for Disk cloning and imaging. It can be used to find deleted files and disk analysis.
• Zentral - Combines osquery’s powerful endpoint inventory features with a flexible notification and action framework. This enables one to identify and react to changes on OS X and Linux clients.

Books

• Applied Incident Response - Steve Anson’s book on Incident Response.
• DFIR intro - By Scott J. Roberts.
• Incident Response & Computer Forensics, Third Edition - The definitive guide to incident response.
• Intelligence-Driven Incident Response - By Scott J. Roberts, Rebekah Brown.
• Operator Handbook: Red Team + OSINT + Blue Team Reference - Great reference for incident responders.
• The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response - Richard Bejtlich’s book on IR.

Communities

• augmentd - Community driven site providing a list of searches that can be implemented in and executed with a variety of common security tools.
• Sans DFIR mailing list - Mailing list by SANS for DFIR.
• Slack DFIR channel - Slack DFIR Communitiy channel - Signup here.

Disk Image Creation Tools

• AccessData FTK Imager - Forensics tool whose main purpose is to preview recoverable data from a disk of any kind. FTK Imager can also acquire live memory and paging file on 32bit and 64bit systems.
• Bitscout - Bitscout by Vitaly Kamluk helps you build your fully-trusted customizable LiveCD/LiveUSB image to be used for remote digital forensics (or perhaps any other task of your choice). It is meant to be transparent and monitorable by the owner of the system, forensically sound, customizable and compact.
• GetData Forensic Imager - Windows based program that will acquire, convert, or verify a forensic image in one of the following common forensic file formats.
• Guymager - Free forensic imager for media acquisition on Linux.
• Magnet ACQUIRE - ACQUIRE by Magnet Forensics allows various types of disk acquisitions to be performed on Windows, Linux, and OS X as well as mobile operating systems.

Evidence Collection

• bulk_extractor - Computer forensics tool that scans a disk image, a file, or a directory of files and extracts useful information without parsing the file system or file system structures. Because of ignoring the file system structure, the program distinguishes itself in terms of speed and thoroughness.
• Cold Disk Quick Response - Streamlined list of parsers to quickly analyze a forensic image file (dd, E01, .vmdk, etc) and output nine reports.
• CyLR - The CyLR tool collects forensic artifacts from hosts with NTFS file systems quickly, securely and minimizes impact to the host.
• artifactcollector - The artifactcollector project provides a software that collects forensic artifacts on systems.
• ir-rescue - Windows Batch script and a Unix Bash script to comprehensively collect host forensic data during incident response.
• Live Response Collection - Automated tool that collects volatile data from Windows, OSX, and *nix based operating systems.
• Margarita Shotgun - Command line utility (that works with or without Amazon EC2 instances) to parallelize remote memory acquisition.
• UAC - UAC (Unix-like Artifacts Collector) is a Live Response collection tool for Incident Reponse that makes use of built-in tools to automate the collection of Unix-like systems artifacts. Supported systems: AIX, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, Netscaler, OpenBSD and Solaris.

Incident Management

• CyberCPR - Community and commercial incident management tool with Need-to-Know built in to support GDPR compliance while handling sensitive incidents.
• Cyphon - Cyphon eliminates the headaches of incident management by streamlining a multitude of related tasks through a single platform. It receives, processes and triages events to provide an all-encompassing solution for your analytic workflow — aggregating data, bundling and prioritizing alerts, and empowering analysts to investigate and document incidents.
• CORTEX XSOAR - Paloalto security orchestration, automation and response platform with full Incident lifecycle management and many integrations to enhance automations.
• DFIRTrack - Incident Response tracking application handling one or more incidents via cases and tasks with a lot of affected systems and artifacts.
• Fast Incident Response (FIR) - Cybersecurity incident management platform designed with agility and speed in mind. It allows for easy creation, tracking, and reporting of cybersecurity incidents and is useful for CSIRTs, CERTs and SOCs alike.
• KAPE - A triage tool that finds the most prevalent digital artifacts and then parses them quickly. Great and thorough when time is of the essence.
  
• RTIR - Request Tracker for Incident Response (RTIR) is the premier open source incident handling system targeted for computer security teams. We worked with over a dozen CERT and CSIRT teams around the world to help you handle the ever-increasing volume of incident reports. RTIR builds on all the features of Request Tracker.
• Sandia Cyber Omni Tracker (SCOT) - Incident Response collaboration and knowledge capture tool focused on flexibility and ease of use. Our goal is to add value to the incident response process without burdening the user.
• threat_note - Lightweight investigation notebook that allows security researchers the ability to register and retrieve indicators related to their research.

Linux Distributions

• The Appliance for Digital Investigation and Analysis (ADIA) - VMware-based appliance used for digital investigation and acquisition and is built entirely from public domain software. Among the tools contained in ADIA are Autopsy, the Sleuth Kit, the Digital Forensics Framework, log2timeline, Xplico, and Wireshark. Most of the system maintenance uses Webmin. It is designed for small-to-medium sized digital investigations and acquisitions. The appliance runs under Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Both i386 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit) versions are available.
• Computer Aided Investigative Environment (CAINE) - Contains numerous tools that help investigators during their analysis, including forensic evidence collection.
• CCF-VM - CyLR CDQR Forensics Virtual Machine (CCF-VM): An all-in-one solution to parsing collected data, making it easily searchable with built-in common searches, enable searching of single and multiple hosts simultaneously.
• Digital Evidence & Forensics Toolkit (DEFT) - Linux distribution made for computer forensic evidence collection. It comes bundled with the Digital Advanced Response Toolkit (DART) for Windows. A light version of DEFT, called DEFT Zero, is also available, which is focused primarily on forensically sound evidence collection.
• NST - Network Security Toolkit - Linux distribution that includes a vast collection of best-of-breed open source network security applications useful to the network security professional.
• PALADIN - Modified Linux distribution to perform various forenics task in a forensically sound manner. It comes with many open source forensics tools included.
• Security Onion - Special Linux distro aimed at network security monitoring featuring advanced analysis tools.
• SANS Investigative Forensic Toolkit (SIFT) Workstation - Demonstrates that advanced incident response capabilities and deep dive digital forensic techniques to intrusions can be accomplished using cutting-edge open-source tools that are freely available and frequently updated.

Linux Evidence Collection

• FastIR Collector Linux - FastIR for Linux collects different artefacts on live Linux and records the results in csv files.

Log Analysis Tools

• AppCompatProcessor - AppCompatProcessor has been designed to extract additional value from enterprise-wide AppCompat / AmCache data beyond the classic stacking and grepping techniques.
• APT Hunter - APT-Hunter is Threat Hunting tool for windows event logs.
• Event Log Explorer - Tool developed to quickly analyze log files and other data.
• Kaspersky CyberTrace - Threat intelligence fusion and analysis tool that integrates threat data feeds with SIEM solutions. Users can immediately leverage threat intelligence for security monitoring and incident report (IR) activities in the workflow of their existing security operations.
• Lorg - Tool for advanced HTTPD logfile security analysis and forensics.
• Logdissect - CLI utility and Python API for analyzing log files and other data.
• Sigma - Generic signature format for SIEM systems already containing an extensive ruleset.
• StreamAlert - Serverless, real-time log data analysis framework, capable of ingesting custom data sources and triggering alerts using user-defined logic.
• SysmonSearch - SysmonSearch makes Windows event log analysis more effective and less time consuming by aggregation of event logs.
• Zircolite - A standalone and fast SIGMA-based detection tool for EVTX or JSON.

Memory Analysis Tools

• AVML - A portable volatile memory acquisition tool for Linux.
• Evolve - Web interface for the Volatility Memory Forensics Framework.
• inVtero.net - Advanced memory analysis for Windows x64 with nested hypervisor support.
• LiME - Loadable Kernel Module (LKM), which allows the acquisition of volatile memory from Linux and Linux-based devices, formerly called DMD.
• MalConfScan - MalConfScan is a Volatility plugin extracts configuration data of known malware. Volatility is an open-source memory forensics framework for incident response and malware analysis. This tool searches for malware in memory images and dumps configuration data. In addition, this tool has a function to list strings to which malicious code refers.
• Memoryze - Free memory forensic software that helps incident responders find evil in live memory. Memoryze can acquire and/or analyze memory images, and on live systems, can include the paging file in its analysis.
• Memoryze for Mac - Memoryze for Mac is Memoryze but then for Macs. A lower number of features, however.
• Rekall - Open source tool (and library) for the extraction of digital artifacts from volatile memory (RAM) samples.
• Responder PRO - Responder PRO is the industry standard physical memory and automated malware analysis solution.
• Volatility - Advanced memory forensics framework.
• VolatilityBot - Automation tool for researchers cuts all the guesswork and manual tasks out of the binary extraction phase, or to help the investigator in the first steps of performing a memory analysis investigation.
• VolDiff - Malware Memory Footprint Analysis based on Volatility.
• WindowsSCOPE - Memory forensics and reverse engineering tool used for analyzing volatile memory offering the capability of analyzing the Windows kernel, drivers, DLLs, and virtual and physical memory.

Memory Imaging Tools

• Belkasoft Live RAM Capturer - Tiny free forensic tool to reliably extract the entire content of the computer’s volatile memory – even if protected by an active anti-debugging or anti-dumping system.
• Linux Memory Grabber - Script for dumping Linux memory and creating Volatility profiles.
• Magnet RAM Capture - Free imaging tool designed to capture the physical memory of a suspect’s computer. Supports recent versions of Windows.
• OSForensics - Tool to acquire live memory on 32bit and 64bit systems. A dump of an individual process’s memory space or physical memory dump can be done.

OSX Evidence Collection

• Knockknock - Displays persistent items(scripts, commands, binaries, etc.) that are set to execute automatically on OSX.
• macOS Artifact Parsing Tool (mac_apt) - Plugin based forensics framework for quick mac triage that works on live machines, disk images or individual artifact files.
• OSX Auditor - Free Mac OS X computer forensics tool.
• OSX Collector - OSX Auditor offshoot for live response.

Other Lists

• Eric Zimmerman Tools - An updated list of forensic tools created by Eric Zimmerman, an instructor for SANS institute.
• List of various Security APIs - Collective list of public JSON APIs for use in security.

Other Tools

• Cortex - Cortex allows you to analyze observables such as IP and email addresses, URLs, domain names, files or hashes one by one or in bulk mode using a Web interface. Analysts can also automate these operations using its REST API.
• Crits - Web-based tool which combines an analytic engine with a cyber threat database.
• Diffy - DFIR tool developed by Netflix’s SIRT that allows an investigator to quickly scope a compromise across cloud instances (Linux instances on AWS, currently) during an incident and efficiently triaging those instances for followup actions by showing differences against a baseline.
• domfind - Python DNS crawler for finding identical domain names under different TLDs.
• Fenrir - Simple IOC scanner. It allows scanning any Linux/Unix/OSX system for IOCs in plain bash. Created by the creators of THOR and LOKI.
• Fileintel - Pull intelligence per file hash.
• HELK - Threat Hunting platform.
• Hindsight - Internet history forensics for Google Chrome/Chromium.
• Hostintel - Pull intelligence per host.
• imagemounter - Command line utility and Python package to ease the (un)mounting of forensic disk images.
• Kansa - Modular incident response framework in Powershell.
• Munin - Online hash checker for Virustotal and other services.
• PowerSponse - PowerSponse is a PowerShell module focused on targeted containment and remediation during security incident response.
• PyaraScanner - Very simple multithreaded many-rules to many-files YARA scanning Python script for malware zoos and IR.
• rastrea2r - Allows one to scan disks and memory for IOCs using YARA on Windows, Linux and OS X.
• RaQet - Unconventional remote acquisition and triaging tool that allows triage a disk of a remote computer (client) that is restarted with a purposely built forensic operating system.
• Stalk - Collect forensic data about MySQL when problems occur.
• Scout2 - Security tool that lets Amazon Web Services administrators assess their environment’s security posture.
• Stenographer - Packet capture solution which aims to quickly spool all packets to disk, then provide simple, fast access to subsets of those packets. It stores as much history as it possible, managing disk usage, and deleting when disk limits are hit. It’s ideal for capturing the traffic just before and during an incident, without the need explicit need to store all of the network traffic.
• sqhunter - Threat hunter based on osquery and Salt Open (SaltStack) that can issue ad-hoc or distributed queries without the need for osquery’s tls plugin. sqhunter allows you to query open network sockets and check them against threat intelligence sources.
• traceroute-circl - Extended traceroute to support the activities of CSIRT (or CERT) operators. Usually CSIRT team have to handle incidents based on IP addresses received. Created by Computer Emergency Responce Center Luxembourg.
• X-Ray 2.0 - Windows utility (poorly maintained or no longer maintained) to submit virus samples to AV vendors.

Playbooks

• AWS Incident Response Runbook Samples - AWS IR Runbook Samples meant to be customized per each entity using them. The three samples are: “DoS or DDoS attack”, “credential leakage”, and “unintended access to an Amazon S3 bucket”.
• Counteractive Playbooks - Counteractive PLaybooks collection.
• GuardSIght Playbook Battle Cards - A collection of Cyber Incident Response Playbook Battle Cards
• IRM - Incident Response Methodologies by CERT Societe Generale.
• IR Workflow Gallery - Different generic incident response workflows, e.g. for malware outbreak, data theft, unauthorized access,… Every workflow constists of seven steps: prepare, detect, analyze, contain, eradicate, recover, post-incident handling. The workflows are online available or for download.
• PagerDuty Incident Response Documentation - Documents that describe parts of the PagerDuty Incident Response process. It provides information not only on preparing for an incident, but also what to do during and after. Source is available on GitHub.
• Phantom Community Playbooks - Phantom Community Playbooks for Splunk but also customizable for other use.

Process Dump Tools

• Microsoft ProcDump - Dumps any running Win32 processes memory image on the fly.
• PMDump - Tool that lets you dump the memory contents of a process to a file without stopping the process.

Sandboxing/reversing tools

• AMAaaS - Android Malware Analysis as a Service, executed in a native Android environment.
• Any Run - Interactive online malware analysis service for dynamic and static research of most types of threats using any environment.
• CAPEv2 - Malware Configuration And Payload Extraction.
• Cuckoo - Open Source Highly configurable sandboxing tool.
• Cuckoo-modified - Heavily modified Cuckoo fork developed by community.
• Cuckoo-modified-api - Python library to control a cuckoo-modified sandbox.
• Cutter - Reverse engineering platform powered by Radare2.
• Hybrid-Analysis - Free powerful online sandbox by CrowdStrike.
• Intezer - Intezer Analyze dives into Windows binaries to detect micro-code similarities to known threats, in order to provide accurate yet easy-to-understand results.
• Joe Sandbox (Community) - Joe Sandbox detects and analyzes potential malicious files and URLs on Windows, Android, Mac OS, Linux, and iOS for suspicious activities; providing comprehensive and detailed analysis reports.
• Mastiff - Static analysis framework that automates the process of extracting key characteristics from a number of different file formats.
• Metadefender Cloud - Free threat intelligence platform providing multiscanning, data sanitization and vulnerability assesment of files.
• Radare2 - Reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset.
• Reverse.IT - Alternative domain for the Hybrid-Analysis tool provided by CrowdStrike.
• StringSifter - A machine learning tool that ranks strings based on their relevance for malware analysis.
• Valkyrie Comodo - Valkyrie uses run-time behavior and hundreds of features from a file to perform analysis.
• Viper - Python based binary analysis and management framework, that works well with Cuckoo and YARA.
• Virustotal - Free online service that analyzes files and URLs enabling the identification of viruses, worms, trojans and other kinds of malicious content detected by antivirus engines and website scanners.
• Visualize_Logs - Open source visualization library and command line tools for logs (Cuckoo, Procmon, more to come).
• Yomi - Free MultiSandbox managed and hosted by Yoroi.

Timeline tools

• Aurora Incident Response - Platform developed to build easily a detailed timeline of an incident.
• Highlighter - Free Tool available from Fire/Mandiant that will depict log/text file that can highlight areas on the graphic, that corresponded to a key word or phrase. Good for time lining an infection and what was done post compromise.
• Morgue - PHP Web app by Etsy for managing postmortems.
• Plaso - a Python-based backend engine for the tool log2timeline.
• Timesketch - Open source tool for collaborative forensic timeline analysis.

Videos

• The Future of Incident Response - Presented by Bruce Schneier at OWASP AppSecUSA 2015.

Windows Evidence Collection

• AChoir - Framework/scripting tool to standardize and simplify the process of scripting live acquisition utilities for Windows.
• Crowd Response - Lightweight Windows console application designed to aid in the gathering of system information for incident response and security engagements. It features numerous modules and output formats.
• DFIR ORC - DFIR ORC is a collection of specialized tools dedicated to reliably parse and collect critical artefacts such as the MFT, registry hives or event logs. DFIR ORC collects data, but does not analyze it: it is not meant to triage machines. It provides a forensically relevant snapshot of machines running Microsoft Windows. The code can be found on GitHub.
• FastIR Collector - Tool that collects different artefacts on live Windows systems and records the results in csv files. With the analyses of these artefacts, an early compromise can be detected.
• Fibratus - Tool for exploration and tracing of the Windows kernel.
• IREC - All-in-one IR Evidence Collector which captures RAM Image, $MFT, EventLogs, WMI Scripts, Registry Hives, System Restore Points and much more. It is FREE, lightning fast and easy to use.
• Invoke-LiveResponse - Invoke-LiveResponse is a live response tool for targeted collection.
• IOC Finder - Free tool from Mandiant for collecting host system data and reporting the presence of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs). Support for Windows only. No longer maintained. Only fully supported up to Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2.
• IRTriage - Incident Response Triage - Windows Evidence Collection for Forensic Analysis.
• LOKI - Free IR scanner for scanning endpoint with yara rules and other indicators(IOCs).
• MEERKAT - PowerShell-based triage and threathunting for Windows.
• Panorama - Fast incident overview on live Windows systems.
• PowerForensics - Live disk forensics platform, using PowerShell.
• PSRecon - PSRecon gathers data from a remote Windows host using PowerShell (v2 or later), organizes the data into folders, hashes all extracted data, hashes PowerShell and various system properties, and sends the data off to the security team. The data can be pushed to a share, sent over email, or retained locally.
• RegRipper - Open source tool, written in Perl, for extracting/parsing information (keys, values, data) from the Registry and presenting it for analysis.