NAME
GrokEVT - a collection of scripts built for reading windows event log
files.
DESCRIPTION
This document serves as an overview to using the GrokEVT suite of
tools. Please see the man pages for each tool for specific command-line
options.
USING
Using GrokEVT on a set of windows partitions is a three stage process.
One must first mount the partitions and configure the system’s profile.
Next, grokevt-builddb(1) must be run to extract the necessary
information from these partitions. Finally, grokevt-parselog(1) may be
run to use this information to convert the logs to something useful.
Mounting and configuration:
This is the most labor-intensive step of the process. There are several
technical reasons why this cannot be simpler, and it is unlikely many
will be resolved anytime soon. (Sorry, blame the vendor who produced
these logs that you wish to convert.)
First mount the partitions used by your windows system. Specifically,
mount any partition that has software installed on it. (You can
probably get away with not mounting ones with no software, or no
software that produces events in the event log.) This includes windows
shares, if you have any with software installed on them.
The key point when mounting partitions or shares, is that you must
mount them with case-insensitive filenames. To do this in Linux, you
should be able to use the NTFS option ’posix=0’, or with type vfat this
appears to be the default. On FreeBSD, one can use the -i option with
NTFS and mount_ntfs, but this hasn’t been tested. (More research is
necessary in this area. Please let me know if case-insensitivity is
available on other *NIXes and what the options are.) All of this, of
course, depends on your version of mount and related software. See
mount(8) for more information.
Once you have all necessary filesystems mounted for your windows image,
you need to configure GrokEVT so it knows where everything is. If you
look in the main configuration directory, (by default at
’/usr/local/etc/grokevt’) you’ll find a sub-directory called ’systems’.
In there is a set of system configuration profiles. Each directory
under ’systems’ represents the configuration for a single windows host.
You may create directories here of any name. It is suggested you use
the host name of the system you wish to extract logs from.
By default, there will be one system configuration there already, named
’example’. I suggest you make a full copy of this, and edit it from
there to create your own configuration:
# cd /usr/local/etc/grokevt/systems
# cp -r example mysystem
Now that you have your own configuration, take a look at the files
under this directory:
path-vars/%SystemRoot%
system-registry
drives/c:
drives/d:
Each file represents a single configuration setting. The first line of
every file is the setting, all others are ignored. You should start by
configuring your drive letters. These drive letters need to map to the
*NIX path of the drives. So, if you mounted your C: partition under
’/mnt/win/c’, then you should do the following:
echo /mnt/win/c > drives/c:
This will of course, overwrite that file with your actual mount point
for the C: drive. Do this for all drives mounted on your windows
system.
Next, you need to configure your %SystemRoot% path variable. Since the
registry often references files in relation to this variable, we need
to know where it is on your system. Typically, on W2K this should be
’C:\WINNT’. On other windows systems it is often ’C:\Windows’. This
path may be referenced as a full windows path (with drive letters) or
as a *NIX path.
Finally, you need to set the path of the system registry. This path
must be a *NIX path, and not a windows path. It should be located under
your %SystemRoot%. For instance, if you mount a W2K machine’s C: on
’/mnt/win/c’, this path will probably be:
/mnt/win/c/WINNT/system32/config/system
This will vary from system to system, but if you have ever done any
forensics, you should be able to find the correct path pretty quickly.
Using grokevt-builddb(1):
Once you get past the mounting and configuration step, you’re in good
shape. To extract the necessary information from the system you just
mounted, you just need to decide where you want to store the output
database. Based on the example paths above, one could run grokevt-
builddb(1) like so:
grokevt-builddb mysystem /var/db/grokevt/mysystem
Or something similar. This step will take some time, as a lot of files
need to be parsed. You will likely get some warnings about missing DLLs
and possibly service removals. This is normal if software on the
windows system failed to clean up the registry correctly when it was
un-installed. You might want to record this information though, if
later you find you are missing a lot of message templates in your log
output.
Now that you have finished this step, you have fully extracted all
information needed to interpret the event logs.
Using grokevt-parselog(1):
To run grokevt-parselog(1), you must specify the database directory
that you generated with grokevt-builddb(1). Initially, you will want to
find out what event logs were extracted by running:
grokevt-parselog -l /var/db/grokevt/mysystem
This will print out all available event log types, based on information
found previously in the system’s registry. Then you may view one of
those logs simply by dropping the -l option, and adding it’s name as
the second parameter. For instance, to view the ’System’ log:
grokevt-parselog /var/db/grokevt/mysystem System
See the grokevt-parselog(1) man page for further options.
Finding and Parsing Log Fragments:
One may find it useful to parse deleted log files or fragments of log
files found in a system’s RAM dump. A special-purpose tool, grokevt-
findlogs(1) is included in this distribution which makes finding log
fragments easy. It can find even a single log record by itself with a
relatively low rate of false positives.
Suppose one has a file, dump.img, which contains an image of a system’s
RAM, or perhaps the unallocated blocks of a filesystem (as might be
produced by The SleuthKit’s dls(1)). One could search this dump by
running:
grokevt-findlogs dump.img
This will produce a listing of all hits in the file, which may include
header records, cursor records, or log records, offsets and contiguity
information to help one eliminate any false positives.
Supposing we found a log fragment in this dump that we’re interested
in, we could simply use dd(1) or some other tool to carve out the
relevant data in to a file named fragment.evt. We’d then need to find a
way to associate this log with a set of message templates. This is
what grokevt-addlog(1) is for. Let’s take a guess that the fragment.evt
was originally a part of System log. We would add the log into our
previously built message database by running:
grokevt-addlog /var/db/grokevt/mysystem fragment.evt System-fragment System
Finally, we can parse the log by simply specifying the newly imported
name with grokevt-parselog(1):
grokevt-parselog /var/db/grokevt/mysystem System-fragment
If we found that most of the log entries didn’t have associated message
templates (which would result in lots of warnings to stderr), we would
be pretty that fragment.evt really wasn’t based on a System log. Simply
re-importing it as another log type (and a different name) would let us
parse it again as if it were of another type.
Please see the grokevt-findlogs(1) and grokevt-addlog(1) man pages for
more information.
CREDITS
This man page written by Timothy D. Morgan
LICENSE
Please see the file "LICENSE" included with this software distribution.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License version 2 for more details.
SEE ALSO
grokevt-addlog(1) grokevt-builddb(1) grokevt-findlogs(1) grokevt-
parselog(1) grokevt-ripdll(1) reglookup(1)