Project Freta – New Free Microsoft Forensic Tool to Detect Malware & Rootkits in Linux Systems

Microsoft launched a new Forensic tool dubbed Project Freta that helps the organization in discovering the undetected malware.

Project Freta helps enterprises in detecting the malware from memory and defend from producers of stealthy malware.

Project Freta

It is a free cloud-based tool offered by the NExT Security Ventures (NSV) team at Microsoft Research, which automates the full-system volatile memory inspection of Linux systems.

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Microsoft said that tool may increase the expenses for producers of stealthy malware, they would be locked into an “expensive cycle of complete re-invention, rendering such a cloud an unsuitable place for cyberattacks.”

The project Freta is open for public access, it is capable of “automatically fingerprinting and auditing a memory snapshot of most cloud-based Linux VMs.”

It supports more than 4,000 kernel versions, with the tool enterprises can check for everything from crypto miners to advanced kernel rootkits.

‘Project Freta was designed and built with survivor bias at its core. It is a security project designed from first principles to drive the cost of sensor evasion as high as possible and in many cases render evasion technically infeasible,” Microsoft said.

The project was named Warsaw’s Freta Street, the birthplace of Marie Curie who brought X-Ray machines to the Battlefield during World War I.

Key Benefits of project Freta

• Detect novel malicious software, kernel rootkits, process hiding, and other intrusion artifacts via agentless operation by operating directly on captured VM snapshots
• Very easy to use: submit a captured image to generate a report of its content
• Memory inspection means no software to install, no notice to malware to evacuate or destroy data
• Designed for automating IR-like discovery tasks directly into a cloud fabric — though volatile memory snapshots captured from an acquisition tool can also be used for bare iron scenarios where virtualization is not available

Here you can find a detailed article on Live Cyber Forensics Analysis with Computer Volatile Memory and Most Important Computer Forensics Tools for Hackers and Security Professionals.

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