Velociraptor is a unique, advanced open-source endpoint monitoring, digital forensic and cyber response platform.
It was originally developed by DFIR professionals who needed a powerful and efficient way to hunt and monitor activities across fleets of endpoints for specific artefacts, in a wide range of digital forensic and cyber incident response investigations such as:
Velociraptor is actively being used by DFIR professionals across cases such as these and continues to grow and develop based on their feedback and ideas.
The most powerful feature of Velociraptor is its framework for creating highly customized artifacts which allow a user to collect, query and monitor almost any aspect of a single endpoint, groups of endpoints or an entire network.
For technical details on how artefacts work, check out the VQL Reference documentation.
Here’s a simple example. Below is a VQL artefact named Windows.Registry.NTUser.Upload which is part of Velociraptor’s default artefact collection.
This artefact first lists all users (using another artefact named Artifact.Windows.Sys.Users) then for each user, collects their NTUSER.DAT registry hive from the endpoint, using raw NTFS access to bypass Windows file system access controls (using the upload function).
1 LET users = SELECT Name, Directory as HomeDir
2 FROM Artifact.Windows.Sys.Users()
3 WHERE Directory
4 SELECT upload(file="\\\\.\\" + HomeDir + "\\ntuser.dat",
5 accessor="ntfs") as Upload
6 FROM users
All these artifacts and functions are documented on this site. Simply search or browse the menu to the left.
Now to extend your reach. The very same VQL artefact can be run as a hunt across multiple endpoints, to simultaneously collect all user hives across your network in one sweep.
All connected endpoints will immediately receive the query and carry out your request. Any endpoints not currently connected will receive the command as soon as they reconnect to the Velociraptor server. No need for repeating the hunt or scheduling multiple hunts - Velociraptor will take care of the job.
The design goals of Velociraptor that we’re working towards, are to be:
Although Velociraptor is already being used on real-life DFIR cases, it’s still early days and is very much a work in progress.
Our roadmap includes many exciting features and developments, including:
We welcome all ideas and suggestions on how Velociraptor could be used and improved and encourage our users to get in touch.