Forensic journey: hunting evil within AmCache securelist.com/amcache-f…

When it comes to digital forensics, AmCache plays a vital role in identifying malicious activities in Windows systems. This artifact allows the identification of the execution of both benign and malicious software on a machine. It is managed by the operating system, and at the time of writing this article, there is no known way to modify or remove AmCache data. Thus, in an incident response scenario, it could be the key to identifying lost artifacts (e.g., ransomware that auto-deletes itself), allowing analysts to search for patterns left by the attacker, such as file names and paths. Furthermore, AmCache stores the SHA-1 hashes of executed files, which allows DFIR professionals to search public threat intelligence feeds — such as OpenTIP and VirusTotal — and generate rules for blocking this same file on other systems across the network.

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the AmCache artifact, allowing readers to better understand its inner workings. In addition, we present a new tool named “AmCache-EvilHunter“, which can be used by any professional to easily parse the Amcache.hve file and extract IOCs. The tool is also able to query the aforementioned intelligence feeds to check for malicious file detections, this level of built-in automation reduces manual effort and speeds up threat detection, which is of significant value for analysts and responders.