mac-robber is a digital investigation tool that collects data from allocated files in a mounted file system. This is useful during incident response when analyzing a live system or when analyzing a dead system in a lab. The data can be used by the mactime tool in The Sleuth Kit to make a timeline of file activity. The mac-robber tool is based on the grave-robber tool from TCT and is written in C instead of Perl.
mac-robber requires that the file system be mounted by the operating system, unlike the tools in The Sleuth Kit that process the file system themselves. Therefore, mac-robber will not collect data from deleted files or files that have been hidden by rootkits. mac-robber will also modify the Access times on directories that are mounted with write permissions.
"What is mac-robber good for then", you ask? mac-robber is useful when dealing with a file system that is not supported by The Sleuth Kit or other file system analysis tools. mac-robber is very basic C and should compile on any UNIX system. Therefore, you can run mac-robber on an obscure, suspect UNIX file system that has been mounted read-only on a trusted system. I have also used mac-robber during investigations of common UNIX systems such as AIX.
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