SANS ISC: Tool Tip: Kansa Stafford released, PowerShell for DFIR

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SANS ISC InfoSec Forums

In his most recent post, Guy asked "Are You a Hunter?". Here's one way to become one.

Dave Hull has just published the Stafford release of his exemplary PowerShell DFIR tool, Kansa. For the uninitiated, Kansa is a modular incident response framework in Powershell.(PS v3 or higher preferred) that uses Powershell Remoting to run user contributed modules across hosts in an enterprise to collect data for use during incident response, breach hunts, or for building an environmental
baseline.

Per Dave's release notes for Stafford, Kansa.ps1 has several new command line parameters, including:

• -OutputFormat: an optional parameter that takes an argument that specifies the format of collected output. Valid values are CSV, JSON, TSV and XML (yuck).
• -UseSSL: if present, this will be passed to the New-PSSession call and remote sessions will use Secure Sockets Layer. Note this does require that you've installed appropriate certificates.
• -Port: an optional parameter that takes a port number. Use this when WinRM is configured to listen on a non-standard port.
• -Authentication: an optional parameter that takes an argument that specifies what authentication mechanism should be used. Kerberos is still the default, but all WinRM authentication mechanisms are now supported. You can even do risky things like Basic or CredSSP, but I wouldn't recommend it.
• -JSONDepth: an optional parameter that takes an integer argument specifying the level of depth for object serialization to JSON.

For more details you can read why Kansa's Stafford release is more capable, more forensically sound, and more flexible via Dave's TrustedSignal blog.

From personal experience, in both work-place and lab environments, Kansa is well worth your time to review and adopt. Additional reference material follows:

http://trustedsignal.blogspot.com/search/label/Kansa
http://www.powershellmagazine.com/2014/07/18/kansa-a-powershell-based-incident-response-framework/
http://holisticinfosec.blogspot.com/2015/01/toolsmith-kansa-vs-operation-cleaver.html

Russ McRee | @holisticinfosec