Challenge Overview

You are a Digital Forensics Analyst responding to an alert from a Security Operations Center (SOC). Suspicious scheduled task executions have been detected on a critical Windows endpoint. The SOC team suspects that an attacker has established a foothold and created a persistence mechanism to maintain access. Your mission is to analyze the provided Windows event logs, reconstruct the attacker's steps, identify the persistence mechanisms used, and recover a hidden flag embedded in the attack artifacts to prove the compromise.

This challenge focuses on the forensic analysis of a common Windows persistence attack chain involving the abuse of scheduled tasks and system services. Learners will examine multiple event logs to uncover the initial compromise, trace the attacker's actions, and understand how different system events are interlinked. The objective is to build a complete attack timeline and uncover the flag hidden within the malicious scheduled task's configuration.

What You Will Learn

  • Analyze Windows Event Logs (EVTX) using Event Viewer to identify suspicious system and user activity.
  • Investigate Scheduled Task persistence by correlating Task Scheduler events and identifying malicious task creation and modification.
  • Detect malicious service installation and privilege escalation by analyzing System and Security event logs.
  • Correlate Event IDs, timestamps, user accounts, and Logon IDs to reconstruct the attack timeline.
  • Identify attacker persistence artifacts, including scheduled tasks, service executables, and associated system-level activity.

Program Curriculum

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