Skip to content

Chainsaw

Chainsaw is one of my favorite tools. It can search through various Windows forensics artifacs quickly. One of the most basic use cases is searching Windows Event logs for keywords. Chainsaw also supports Sigma and can match on an entire folder of Sigma rules when hunting through logs.

The tool can be downloaded here: https://github.com/WithSecureLabs/chainsaw

Command Description
chainsaw search --skip-errors "powershell.exe" Search all logs in the current directory for powershell.exe
chainsaw hunt ~/dfir/logs/--sigma ~/dfir/rules/sigma/rules/ --mapping ~/dfir/mappings/sigma-event-logs-all.yml Search the dfir/logs by matching against an entire sigma repository
./chainsaw search -t 'Event.System.EventID: =4104' /dfir/logs/ Search all dfir logs for powershell script block events
./chainsaw search -e "^.*\.iso$ Search dfir logs for iso file types using regex.
./chainsaw analyse shimcache ./SYSTEM --regexfile ./analysis/shimcache_patterns.txt Search the shimcache based on a regex file
./chainsaw dump ./SOFTWARE.hve --json --output ./output.json Dump the software hve to json