Hey everyone, I've got a bit of a tricky situation on my hands. I'm working with a business-critical system that manages sensitive medical and payment data, so we're under strict HIPAA and PCI regulations. Recently, a vendor made some changes that caused extended downtime, and now I need to gather forensic evidence to figure out what exactly happened and when.
I have a two-hour window from about four days ago when this event took place, and I know some key files were modified. However, those files have since been repaired, so I can't see who changed them or when in the active file system. Unfortunately, we're not keeping backups or snapshots, as it's running on a VM.
My main question is whether XFS retains sufficient journal logs and data to help me identify when a specific configuration file was modified and by whom. If the direct analysis isn't possible on the live system, I'm curious if cloning the VM might give me more data. Just as a side note, SELinux logging isn't enabled, so I'm really digging for solutions. I know someone restarted the network manager service, but it's unclear if the same person modified the configuration leading to the issue. Any advice would be appreciated!
2 Answers
Sounds like a frustrating situation! From my experience, it's crucial to back up the disk first, especially if the VM is still active. Check your login logs—if editing that config file requires elevated privileges, you should have logs showing who had access around that time. If the vendor was using a shared account with root access, it might not give you exact details on the edits, but at least you’ll know who was logged in! If you can't find anything useful, consider restoring a snapshot from just before the outage to see if the file was already messed up before the changes were made.
Yeah, this happens a lot in complex environments! If you can access audit logs, they might help a ton since they track file accesses and modifications. In terms of XFS, it does keep a journal but retrieving that info can be tricky without prior logging set up. Unfortunately, without dedicated logs like auditd, you're limited in what you can gather. But definitely push to clone the VM if you haven't already. It could provide insights you might be missing!
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