In this walkthrough, we'll embark on a digital forensic investigation of a concerning security incident at a company where an employee named Mark Reynolds has been implicated in a potential data breach. The incident began when the company received a blackmail threat claiming possession of proprietary data and demanding payment to prevent its exposure. Initial investigation pointed to Mark's workstation as a potential source of the compromise, showing signs of unusual activity including possible malware execution and suspicious downloads. To uncover the truth behind this incident, we've been provided with a memory dump captured from Mark's workstation for in-depth analysis. This memory capture represents a snapshot of the system's state at the time of acquisition and contains valuable forensic artifacts that can reveal the sequence of events, attack vectors, and methods of data exfiltration.
Throughout this walkthrough, we'll employ sophisticated memory forensics techniques using specialized tools including MemProcFS, Registry Explorer, Eric Zimmerman's forensic toolkit, CyberChef, and various code analysis utilities. Our investigation will take us through a methodical process of mounting and examining the memory dump, analyzing registry artifacts, inspecting browser history, reverse engineering suspicious executables, and reconstructing file system activities from NTFS journal logs.The questions we'll address will help us piece together the complete attack timeline - from identifying the applications Mark was using during the relevant timeframe, to determining exactly when suspicious activities occurred, to uncovering the attacker's command and control infrastructure, and ultimately