Veronica Schmitt, a senior digital forensic scientist at DFIRLABS, recently featured on Paul’s Security Weekly, showcasing the Microsoft SRUM system tool (System Resource Utilization Monitor).
SRUM was first introduced in Windows 8, and was a new feature designed to track system resource utilization such as CPU cycles, network activity, power consumption, etc. Analysts can use the data collected by SRUM to paint a picture of a user’s activity, and even correlate that activity with network-related events, data transfer, processes, and more.
Very little is known about SRUM outside of a few notes and videos online, and most tellingly, very few sysadmins know about the storage function of this tool.
That sounds pretty interesting. And it is, especially for performance and system monitoring.
But …
The output from SRUM is continually (at 60min intervals) written to an ese DB, which in turn can be read by a python tool called srum-dump written by Mark Bagget and output to a CSV for further analytics.
The scary part of this is how much data SRUM is actually writing out to the db and what info can be gleaned from this db in forensics terms. Essentially, any actions performed or data generated by a user on that system, can we retrieved at a later stage by srum-dump.
From a forensics pov, that’s brilliant but from a privacy pov, it is very scary. Especially as very few people realise this is going on in the background. It’s also scary in the way that if a (Windows) machine is compromised, the SRUM db can be used to propagate additional (lateral or vertical) malicious activity depending on the data identified.
Comments welcome …