Question

As part of incident response, a technician is taking an image of a compromised system and copying the image to a remote image server ( ). The system drive is very large but does not contain the sensitive data. The technician has limited time to complete this task.

Which of the following is the BEST command for the technician to run?

A. tar cvf - / | ssh "cat - > /images/ "
B. dd if=/dev/mem | scp - :/images/
C. memdump /dev/sda1 | nc 3000
D. dd if=/dev/sda | nc 3000

Answer 1

The optimal command to image a compromised system and transfer it to a remote server under time constraints is 'dd if=/dev/sda | nc '. This command is efficient as it streams the disk image directly over the network using 'dd' and 'netcat'.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student is asking about the most efficient command to create an image of a compromised system and transfer it to a remote server as part of incident response activities when constrained by time and a large system drive. The best command for this purpose would be D. dd if=/dev/sda | nc <remote_server_ip> <port>.

This command uses dd to create a bit-by-bit image of the entire disk (/dev/sda) and then pipes (|) the output directly to netcat (nc), which sends it to the specified remote server IP and port. This method is quick and efficient because it avoids writing the image to the compromised machine's local disk first and utilizes the network directly.