auto

Accessor

Description

Access the file using the best accessor possible.

The auto accessor is the default accessor that is used when a VQL query does not specify an accessor parameter.

On Windows it attempts to open the file using the file accessor and if that fails (for example due to permission errors), the auto accessor automatically tries the ntfs accessor to access the file using raw level filesystem parsing.

The overall effect is that the Velociraptor is able to transparently access files that are locked (for example registry hives) or are protected by filter drivers (e.g. some endpoint security software). In general you should use the auto accessor to open files on the local filesystem in all cases since it will be much faster than using the ntfs accessor for every file (most files are not actually locked).

On other operating systems, the auto accessor is an alias to the file accessor.