Hello Reader,

I’m often surprised by how many effective open source DFIR tools are overlooked. One of my favorites is page_brute. This tool tackles a tricky problem: parsing logical data chunks from the page file without accidentally merging memory segments from different programs.

Page_brute accomplishes this elegantly by carving the page file into segments equal to a single memory page. It then applies YARA rules to categorize each chunk. I mainly use it to recover AJAX fragments and other temporary web objects that never make it to disk. Since the content I’m after is usually small enough to fit within one memory page, this approach works exceptionally well for webmail investigations.

If you’re looking for a reliable method to recover and categorize page file contents, I highly recommend giving page_brute a try: GitHub - matonis/page_brute.