mac-robber

               Brian Carrier <carrier@atstake.com>
           @stake Inc. <www.atstake.com/research/tools>



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 Coroners Toolkit (TCT) reads.

mac-robber is based on the grave-robber tool from The Coroners
Toolkit (TCT)[1] 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 TCT 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 TCT does support.

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


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 Coroners Toolkit [1]
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 Coroners Toolkit (TCT), available at: 
	http://www.porcupine.org/forensics/tct.html
	http://www.fish.com/tct/


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January 20, 2002