Ntfs Mft Parsing

Category: FORENSICS · Difficulty: Medium · Points: 250 · Challenge: 484

Background

Following an emergency drive seizure from a compromised hypervisor node, examiners isolated the raw Master File Table. Although the operating system reported the flag document as deleted, residual record extents remain preserved across resident attributes. FORMAT: FLAG{ }

Analysis

The evidence file is 590 bytes and carries a generator marker followed by a single configuration line. Reading printable runs across the file recovers the value directly:

$ strings -n 8 evidence-042.raw
[FORENSIC_TRIAGE_TARGET_042]
CONFIDENTIAL_FLAG=FLAG{cwa2026_9b7caefcc61a3e1e}

The file holds no filesystem image, no archive structure and no encoded payload beyond the plaintext line above. No FILE record signature is present, so the attribute and run-list parsing described in the brief was not required.

Result

FLAG{cwa2026_9b7caefcc61a3e1e}