Hi everyone, I just published a complete walkthrough for the v0l4til3 challenge from the recent InsomniHack 2025 CTF. If you are looking to get into memory forensics or want to understand why Volatility 3 is the industry standard (and how it differs from Volatility 2), this challenge was a perfect case study.
The challenge provided a raw memory dump and tasked us with uncovering specific artifacts to find the flag. In my writeup, I move past the basic "run strings and pray" method and demonstrate a structured forensic approach.
Here is the TL;DR of the investigation:
Profile Identification: I started by using windows.info to identify the operating system build. Unlike Volatility 2, Volatility 3 handles symbols dynamically, which saves a ton of time, but you still need to ensure your symbol tables are up to date.
Process Analysis: using windows.pslist and windows.pstree, I mapped out the running processes. The goal was to identify any anomalies—like a notepad.exe spawned by a suspicious parent or a process running from a temp directory.
Command Line Arguments: This is often the lowest-hanging fruit. I used windows.cmdline to see the arguments passed to each process. In this case, it revealed the path to a suspicious file that wasn't immediately obvious in the process list.
File Extraction: Once the target file was identified via windows.filescan, I demonstrated how to use windows.dumpfiles to extract the artifact directly from memory for analysis.
The Flag: I break down how we finally recovered the flag, whether it was hidden in a console history buffer or inside a dumped file.
Memory forensics is often the only way to detect fileless malware or recover encryption keys. This walkthrough is designed to be a "cheat sheet" for using Volatility 3's most essential plugins effectively.
If you want to see the exact commands, the plugin outputs, and the full methodology, check out the article here:
Memory Forensics with Volatility 3 - InsomniHack 2025 v0l4til3 Walkthrough
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