Announcing the Magnet Custom Artifact Challenge

Hi all, this is Jessica Hyde from Magnet Forensics. As the MagnetWeeklyCTF ends and we are behind the scenes working on the Magnet Virtual Summit for May, we wanted to share another fun challenge with the community. We wanted to create a challenge that leverages skills many have gained during the CTF but that is relevant to what you are seeing in your case work or researching. With that, we would like to announce the Magnet Custom Artifact Challenge!

I am excited about this challenge for several reasons, 1) the opportunity for folks to create artifacts for what they are seeing, 2) ability for users to have access to community created artifacts via the Artifact Exchange, 3) more sharing in the community which is helpful for the reasons I recently outlined in a post Ways to Share in DFIR.

This challenge will run from January 4, 2021 through March 31, 2021 and will have a points system for every custom artifact submitted and accepted.  You can earn points multiple ways including creating an artifact, writing a blog post about a submitted artifact, and sharing about your artifact on Linked In or Twitter. Custom Artifacts must be submitted by March 31, but may be accepted afterwards to count. To participate, simply submit a Custom Artifact to the Artifact Exchange here. If you draft a blog, be sure to tweet or use Linked In to share it with the hashtag #MagnetArtifactChallenge.

Points:

• Custom Artifact – 50 points
• Blog about a submitted artifact – 25 points
• Social Media posts with #MagnetArtifactChallenge – 5 points each for Linked In and Twitter per week

I will tweet out the rankings at the end of each month. The winner will be announced at the Magnet Virtual Summit this May.

New to creating Custom Artifacts? Check out this Tips and Tricks on Custom Artifacts. There are a multiple ways they can be created; SQLite Queries in a template, REGEX expressions in a template, Python scripts, and the quickest way – via the Magnet Custom Artifact Generator – NO CODING SKILLS REQUIRED! You can create a custom artifact to parse an unsupported artifact or to bring in results from other tools for analysis in AXIOM.

Want to know how to take advantage of custom artifacts generated by the community? You can download the artifacts from the Artifact Exchange as demonstrated in this video from Jamie McQuaid. Tarah Melton did a great blog highlighting some of the excellent artifacts available on the exchange here. There are custom artifacts available for both parsing additional artifacts and bringing in results from other tools like iLEAPP, ALEAPP, and Bulk Extractor.

If you have any questions about the Custom Artifact Challenge, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via Twitter or jessica.hyde@magnetforensics.com and I will be happy to assist! Good luck everyone!