System Configuration and Persistence

A sophisticated adversary or cheater often aims for more than a single, successful execution. They seek to establish a persistent foothold on the system, ensuring their tools run automatically, survive reboots, and operate with minimal user interaction. This chapter focuses on the forensic artifacts that reveal how a system is configured and what mechanisms are in place for persistence.

Analyzing these artifacts allows an investigation to move beyond tracking singular events and instead uncover long-term, automated, or hidden activities. We will explore the core configuration databases of Windows and the logs that track fundamental system events. This is where we answer questions like: "What programs are set to launch automatically at startup?", "Have critical system services been tampered with?", and "Was a cheat executed from a now-disconnected USB drive?"

This chapter will cover:

• The Windows Registry: The central nervous system of the operating system, which not only stores configuration settings but also hosts critical persistence locations like the Run and RunOnce keys.

• Task Scheduler Artifacts: The files and registry keys that define scheduled tasks, a powerful and commonly abused mechanism for automating the execution of malicious scripts and loaders.

• USB Device History: The trail of evidence left behind when external storage devices are connected to the system, crucial for investigating cheats that are stored on and run from removable media.

• Windows Event Logs: The comprehensive, time-stamped diaries of the operating system. They are the ultimate source for detecting system-level tampering, such as service manipulation, evidence clearing, and illicit user account activity.

Understanding these artifacts is essential for detecting the most insidious types of cheats—those that are designed to hide in plain sight by integrating themselves into the normal startup and operation of the Windows OS. They provide the evidence needed to expose not just a one-time action, but a deliberate and persistent strategy of deception.