                            mac-robber

               Brian Carrier <carrier@sleuthkit.org>
                http://www.sleuthkit.org/mac-robber


OVERVIEW
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mac-robber is a Forensics & Incident Response tool used to collect
the Modified, Access, and Change (MAC) times from allocated files.
It recursively reads MAC times of files and directories and prints
them in 'time machine' format to STDOUT.  This format is the same
that the mactime tool from The Sleuth Kit[1] and The Coroners Toolkit
(TCT)[2] read.

mac-robber is based on the grave-robber tool from The Coroners
Toolkit (TCT) when using the '-m' flag, except it does not require
Perl!

This program has several benefits over using grave-robber:

  - It does not require Perl and therefore a floppy or CD can be
  easily made with mac-robber compiled for several platforms.  By
  default, the program is compiled to be statically linked.

  - It uses very basic C code so it should compile under any
  platform.  If you encounter a platform that The Sleuth Kit does
  not support, then compile this on a trusted system, run it from
  a floppy on the compromised system and send the output to a server
  using netcat.  Then, use mactime on the data from a system that
  The Sleuth Kit does support.  This also works well on file systems
  that are not supported by specialized forensic tools.

  - C is faster than Perl for these type of operations!

Note that this tool will not show deleted files, unallocated files,
or files that have been hidden by rootkits.  To view information
about those file types, the specialized tools from The Sleuth Kit
must be used.


INSTALLATION
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Type:

  # make   

If you do not have gcc (the default compiler), use:

  # make CC=cc

If  you are using the Sun cc Compiler, use:

  # make sun

If it gives errors regarding optimization or the static flag, you can use:

  # make simple

If you encounter problems with the static flag, then please let me know.  



USAGE
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mac-robber takes a list of directories to analyze as arguments:

For example, to analyze the 'mnt' and 'mnt2' directories and send
the output to a file:

  # mac-robber mnt mnt2 > data/body.mac

If you want to analyze the system from the root directory and send
the data to a server running netcat, use:

  # mac-robber / | nc 10.0.0.1 8000

The server would be running something like:

  # nc -l -p 8000 > body.mac

To analyze the data, the mactime tool from The Sleuth Kit is
required.  Use the -b flag to import the body file:

  # mactime -b body.mac 01/01/2001 > timeline.01-01-2001



COMMENTS
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- This file uses the readdir function and therefore will update the 
  Access time on directories.  Therefore, if you are going to make an
  image of the disks, do that first.  Also, malicious kernel modules
  could produce incorrect data when run on a compromised host.

- Make sure that you do not write the output of this program to a
  drive on the compromised system, it may overwrite unallocated data.



REFERENCES
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[1]	The Sleuth Kit, available at: 
    http://www.sleuthkit.org
    http://sleuthkit.sourceforge.net

[2]	The Coroners Toolkit (TCT), available at: 
	http://www.porcupine.org/forensics/
	http://www.fish.com/forensics/


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March 31, 2003
