Notebooks

Notebooks are interactive collaborative documents which can interleave markdown and VQL queries in to create an interactive report. Notebooks are typically used to track and post process one or more hunts or collaborate on an investigation.

Let’s create a notebook to see the feature at work.

1. Start the Velociraptor GUI. You can do so easily by running velociraptor.exe gui. This will create a new server configuration and start a new server on the local machine. It will also start a local client communicating with the server.

2. Select Notebooks from the sidebar menu then “Add Notebook” .

3. Give the notebook a name and a description and submit. The new notebook is created.

4. Click on the cell to give it focus and the cell control toolbar will be shown, from here click the Edit Cell button to edit the cell contents.

There are two types of cells: A Markdown cell receives markdown text and renders HTML while a VQL cell can receive VQL queries. The cell type is shown on the right hand side of the cell toolbar. You may change cells from one type to the other at any time.

5. Lets add a new cell to the notebook. Click the Add Cell button and a pull down menu appears offering the type of Cell that can be added. For now, select a VQL cell.

After clicking the Edit Cell button, you can type VQL directory into the cell. As you type, the GUI offers context sensitive suggestions about what possible completions can appear at the cursor. Typing “?” will show all suggestions possible.

Lets type the following VQL query into the VQL cell.

SELECT * FROM info()

The notebook may be switched into full screen to better emulate a full notebook. With this setting, the notebook takes up the entire width of the screen. You can switch back to the pane view by clicking on the collapse button at the top right of the screen.

Hunt and Flow Notebooks

Notebooks are an excellent medium to run arbitrary VQL queries. Much of the time, these queries are used to post process the results from collections or hunts.

Therefore Velociraptor automatically creates a hunt notebook for each hunt and a flow notebook for each collection. Let’s see this feature in action. I will collect the Windows.Timeline.Prefetch artifact that will build a timeline of the prefetch files on the endpoint.

Sharing Notebooks

By default, notebooks are private to the user who created them. When creating or editing a notebook, you can choose to share it with all users by clicking the Public check box. You can also share it with only some users by selecting their names in the Collaborators field.