Scenario

A multinational corporation has suffered a cyber attack, resulting in the theft of sensitive data. The attack employed a previously unseen variant of the BlackEnergy v2 malware. The company's security team has obtained a memory dump from the infected machine and is seeking your expertise as a SOC analyst to analyze the dump in order to understand the scope and impact of the attack.

https://cyberdefenders.org/blueteam-ctf-challenges/blackenergy/

1- Which volatility profile would be best for this machine?

WinXPSP2x86

I ran imageinfo to get candidate profiles and metadata, then verified the selection with kdbgscan (vol.exe -f <dump> --profile=WinXPSP2x86 kdbgscan). The KDBG structures matched the chosen profile, confirming Windows XP SP2 (32-bit) is the correct profile for further analysis.

2- How many processes were running when the image was acquired?

19

Using pslist to inspect processes and their timestamps, I counted processes that had no valid exit time (exit timestamp 0000-00-00 00:00:00 UTC+0000), which indicates they were running when the image was captured. From the total process list (25), excluding 6 processes with non-empty exit times leaves 19 active processes at acquisition.

3- What is the process ID of cmd.exe?

1960

pslist shows cmd.exe running with PID 1960.