- Aug 8, 2013
- 145
Hi this could be a very useful system tool for those involved in malicious investigations and forensics
Introduction
System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network.
Note that Sysmon does not provide analysis of the events it generates, nor does it attempt to protect or hide itself from attackers.
Overview of Sysmon Capabilities
Sysmon includes the following capabilities:
Sysmon - Sysinternals
Monitors and reports key system activity via the Windows event log.
learn.microsoft.com
Introduction
System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network.
Note that Sysmon does not provide analysis of the events it generates, nor does it attempt to protect or hide itself from attackers.
Overview of Sysmon Capabilities
Sysmon includes the following capabilities:
- Logs process creation with full command line for both current and parent processes.
- Records the hash of process image files using SHA1 (the default), MD5 or SHA256.
- Includes a process GUID in process create events to allow for correlation of events even when Windows reuses process IDs.
- Optionally logs network connections, including each connection’s source process, IP addresses, port numbers, hostnames and port names.
- Detects changes in file creation time to understand when a file was really created. Modification of file create timestamps is a technique commonly used by malware to cover its tracks.
- Generates events from early in the boot process to capture activity made by even sophisticated kernel-mode malware.
