A short write up on windows page file forensics


I am going to do a short write up on page file forensic. As I post blog by keeping newbies in mind I will try to explain some important points in layman form which is important to understand this post for newbies.

What is a Page file?

In Windows, NT when RAM becomes full, the operating system uses your hard drive as virtual RAM and starts placing your data in page file which is called pagefile.sys in Windows NT. Even though reading and writing data from the page file is slower than actual RAM it is still better than crashing your program. This principle works on Paging which is a memory management technique if you want to learn more on paging than you can read it here.


Investigating Page file to retrieve artifacts

As we know page file has data to be used by the operating system we can make a copy of it ( or there are others way to do this also) and can fetch some juicy info to retrieve any useful information which can lead an investigator to take his next decision.



Below we can see pagefile.sys is of 7.9 GB of size (depends on users specified space).



I am going to use strings command which is built in many Linux distributions and grep with regex to fetch URL, email directories, etc.

 So first I will extract all the URLs from this pagefile by typing "strings pagefile.sys | egrep "^https ?://" | less "


And I got all the URL from this pagefile 


There are more URLs than this but I think this should be enough to give an example of how this works.


Now I will fetch directories from this page file using egrep and regex command by typing " strings pagefile.sys | egrep  -i "^[a-z]:\\\\" | less "


 And below you can see file path/directories from this page file



And last greping all emails from this page file for this use this command  " strings pagefile.sys | egrep '([[:alnum:]_.-]{1,64}+@[[:alnum:]_.-]{2,255}+?\.[[:alpha:].]{2,4})' "



And I got the emails 



So by using this technique we can get sensitive info also for investigating the case. 

You can use cyberchef for getting regex command also

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