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The goal of the tutorial is to provide a solution to the forensic challenge game that I created for testing forensic skills of CSIRT team. Please be careful and run a suspicious binary file located inside a provided virtual machine only in a secured environment in order to avoid unwanted damage or loss.
As you can notice, some files are being encrypted right after boot of a virtual machine. All these files have suffix .enc001. You can easily located them with the command:
$ find / -name "*.enc001" -type f 2>/dev/null
There is also a file named encryption_warning.txt located in a home directory of an actual user and it contains a following warning message.
*** Your files have been encrypted! ***
*** To decrypt them, run '/usr/local/bin/ls %1a%your_decryption_key ***
Without any doubts a utility ls is not a cryptography tool so it is a good place where we can start our investigation. The command /usr/local/bin/ls -la shows files in a actual directory.
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ /usr/local/bin/ls -la

Picture 1 - Content of Actual Directory
The output looks good. But what does happen if we display a non-existing file kdkdkdkdk?
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ /usr/local/bin/ls kdkdkdkdk

Picture 2 - Two Error Messages
They are two interesting facts shown in the output of the command /usr/local/bin/ls . Firstly, two Continue reading