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How do I deploy the client as agentless (without install)?

How do I deploy the client as agentless (without install)?

Sometimes we need to deploy Velociraptor in an IR and can not install it permanently as a service.

Windows Environments

It is possible to deploy the client using Group Policy by using Scheduled task feature to cause domain connected machines to run the client. See details here.

  1. The first step is to place the client and the generated client.config.yaml on a public read only windows share.

  2. Update the config file’s writeback location to somewhere writable on the client (e.g. C:\Windows\Temp\velo.writeback.yaml)

  3. Next create a Scheduled Task in a new group policy object that applies to the relevant OU.

  4. The scheduled task should be launched as NT_AUTHORITY\SYSTEM from the read only share. With the appropriate command line. For example:

\\dc\deployment\velociraptor.exe --config \\dc\deployment\client.config.yaml client --mutant MyVeloName

Controlling number of instances

Window’s Group Policy allows setting only a single instance of the program to run at the time, however we found in practice this is not reliable and sometimes GPO will launch dozens of copies of Velociraptor over time. To avoid this we use the --mutant flag which will exit if a mutant of this name already exists.

Linux Environments

Systemd

It is possible to execute a program in a “transient scope”, which enables it to be controlled and inspected just like a regular service (unit) in Linux, without the need to create persistent configurations. Using systemd-run the process will be executed and its parent will be the init process, and will not terminate until the host is rebooted.

To execute the Velociraptor binary run the following:

systemd-run -u velociraptor_tmp /tmp/velociraptor.bin client --config /tmp/client.config.yaml

Once the service is running, you should now be free to terminate the SSH / management session without terminating the process.

You can manually terminate the service with: systemctl stop velociraptor_tmp.service

You can check it’s status with: systemctl status velociraptor_tmp.service

Temporary locations

On Linux /tmp is cleaned up by a service, which gets triggered on shutdown. You will need to arrange for the Velociraptor binary and configuration file to be transferred again if the host reboots.

You can read more about the systemd-run here for flags etc: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-run.html

How do I debug the client while it is running?