Option 1: SIFT VM Appliance Download:
Option 2: SIFT Easy Installation:
Why SIFT?
The SIFT Workstation is a group of free open-source incident response and forensic tools designed to perform detailed digital forensic examinations in a variety of settings. It can match any current incident response and forensic tool suite. SIFT demonstrates that advanced incident response capabilities and deep dive digital forensic techniques to intrusions can be accomplished using cutting-edge open-source tools that are freely available and frequently updated.
Who Created the SIFT?
Rob Lee and his team created and continually update the SIFT Workstation. It's successfully used for incident response and digital forensics and is available to the community as a public service. With over 100,000 downloads to date, the SIFT continues to be the most popular open-source incident-response and digital forensic offering next to commercial source solutions.
Offered as an open source and free project, the SIFT Workstation is taught only in the following incident response courses at SANS:
"Even if SIFT were to cost tens of thousands of dollars, it would still be a very competitive product," says, Alan Paller, director of research at SANS. "At no cost, there is no reason it should not be part of the portfolio in every organization that has skilled incident responders."
"The SIFT Workstation has quickly become my "go to" tool when conducting an exam. The powerful open source forensic tools in the kit on top of the versatile and stable Linux operating system make for quick access to most everything I need to conduct a thorough analysis of a computer system," said Ken Pryor, GCFA Robinson, IL Police Department
Key new features of SIFT include:
Having trouble downloading SIFT?
If you are having trouble downloading the SIFT Kit, please contact sift-support@sans.org and include the URL you were given, your IP address, browser type, and if you are using a proxy of any kind.
SIFT Login/Password:
After downloading the toolkit, use the credentials below to gain access.
Our goal is to make the installation (and upgrade) of the SIFT workstation as simple as possible, so we create the SIFT Command Line project, which is a self-container binary that can be downloaded and executed to convert your Ubuntu installation into a SIFT workstation. Check the entire project out at https://github.com/sans-dfir/sift
To install the SIFT on Ubuntu 16.04 system:
To install the SIFT on Windows 10 system:
A key tool during incident response helping incident responders identify and contain advanced threat groups. The SIFT provides the ability to securely examine raw disks, multiple file systems, and evidence formats. It places strict guidelines on how evidence is examined (read-only) verifying that the evidence has not changed.
File system support
Evidence Image Support
Incident Response Support
Software Includes:
Important Note: The current version of REMnux only works with Ubuntu 14.04, NOT 16.04. Therefore it is currently NOT compatible with the newest version of the SIFT workstation. However, once REMnux is updated to work with 16.04, it will be compatible with SIFT.
As with any release, there will be bugs and requests; please report all issues and bugs to the following website and location.
https://github.com/sans-dfir/sift/issues
SIFT workstation is playing an essential role for the Brazilian national prosecution office, especially due to Brazilian government budgetary constraints. Its incident response and forensic capabilities are bundled on a way that allows an investigation to be conducted much faster than it would take if not having the right programs grouped on such great Linux distribution. The new version, which will be bootable, will be even more helpful. I'd highly recommend SIFT for government agencies or other companies as a first alternative, for acquisition and analysis, from the pricey forensics software available on the market.
- Marcelo Caiado, M.Sc., CISSP, GCFA, EnCE
What I like the best about SIFT is that my forensic analysis is not limited because of only being ableto run an incident response or forensic tool on a specific host operating system. With the SIFT VM Appliance, I can create snapshots to avoid cross-contamination of evidence from case to case, and easily manage system and AV updates to the host OS on my forensic workstation. Not to mention, being able to mount forensic images and share them as read-only with my host OS, where I can run other forensic tools to parse data, stream-lining the forensic examination process.
- Brad Garnett www.digitalforensicsource.com