Hunting

With Velociraptor, you can collect the same artifact from multiple endpoints at the same time using a Hunt. Hunts allow you to do the following:

  • Monitor offline endpoints by scheduling hunts collecting artifacts from any endpoints that come back online during a certain period.

  • Examine the results from all collections easily.

  • Keep track of which endpoints collected the artifact and make sure the same artifact is not collected more than once on any endpoint.

What is a hunt?

A hunt is a logical collection of a one or more artifacts from a group of systems. The Hunt Manager is a Velociraptor component that is responsible for scheduling collections of clients that met certain criteria, then keep track of these collections inside the hunt.

The important takeaway from this is that artifacts are still collected from endpoints the same way as we did previously, it is simply automated using the hunt manager.

Schedule a new hunt

To schedule a new hunt, select the “Hunt Manager” from the sidebar and then select “New Hunt” button to see the New Hunt Wizard.

Provide the hunt with a description and set the expiration date. You can also target machines containing the same label (A Label Group), or exclude the hunt from these machines.

New Hunt
New Hunt

Hunts do not complete - they expire! The total number of clients in any real network is not known in advance because new clients can appear at any time as hosts get provisioned, return from vacation, or get switched on. Therefore it does not make sense to think of a hunt as done. As new clients are discovered, the hunt is applied to them.

It is only when the hunt expires that new clients no longer receive the hunt. Note that each client can only receive the hunt once.

Next you need to select and configure the artifacts as before. Once everything is set, click Launch Hunt to create a new hunt.

Hunts are always created in the Paused state so you will need to click the Start button before they commence. Once a hunt is started many hundreds of machines will begin collecting that artifact, be sure to test artifact on one or two endpoints first.

Start Hunt
Start Hunt

You can monitor the hunt’s progress. As clients are scheduled they will begin their collection. After a while the results are sent back and the clients complete.

Monitoring hunt progress
Monitoring hunt progress

Post-process a hunt

After collecting an artifact from many hosts in a hunt, we often need to post-process the results to identify the results that are important.

Velociraptor creates a notebook for each hunt where you can apply a VQL query to the results.

Let’s consider our earlier example collecting the scheduled tasks from all endpoints. Suppose we wanted to only see those machines with a scheduled task that runs a batch script from cmd.exe and count only unique occurrences of this command.

We can update the notebook’s VQL with a WHERE clause and GROUP BY to post-process the results.

Post Processing
Post Processing

When hunting large numbers of endpoints, data grows quickly. Even uploading a moderately sized file can add up very quickly. For example, collecting a 100Mb file from 10,000 machines results in over 1Tb of required storage.

Be mindful of how much data you will be uploading in total. It is always best to use more targeted artifacts that return a few rows per endpoint rather than fetch raw files that need to be parsed offline.