Complete Reconstruction of Malware Files
Structured recovery depends on the malware family – for some variants it is possible, while for others it remains impossible. Below are actionable instructions and insights that I synthesized after analyzing best-practice incident-response playbooks and court-validated case studies. Adapt everything to the environment you manage:
1. Immediate Response & Containment
- Isolate the compromised hosts at the network layer (802.1x isolation on switch ports, client-based segmentation, null-route the Gateway if it’s a proxy-replacement instead of a file-encryption event).
- Do NOT turn the machine off! RAM-only keys may still be recoverable with Volcano 2.x (x) or memory imagers), but most Gravity.
- **Snap a forensic image of each disk before you do anything else for later legal/criminal proceedings), 4DD/FTK imager is best for bare-metal; if you are virtual use SAN snapshots.
- Log every interaction: command history, PSReadLine or bash_history large time-offset to the iDRAC/LOM.
2. Malware Removal
Outlined step-by-step for a *typical file-encryptor such as CO.
procedures
varies with the variant and with the environment:
a. Boot a Live-CD / WinPE and enumerates the shadow copies (VSS) and looks for:
->
- vssadmin list shadows
- we can delete them.
b. An offline scan with the following engines All of which have very strong generic detection for CO: - Kaspersky Rescue disk, Bitdefender Rescue CD, ESET SysRescue via a prepared USB. You can very easily be in error handling if you do not have the correct PE timestamp it will be<|reservedtoken163707|>