CTF forensics and stego

When it applies

The handout is an artifact to investigate: a packet capture, memory dump, disk image, or an innocent-looking media file. This skill is the CTF quick-win battery — the 80% of challenges that fall to standard tooling run in the right order. For real-IR depth (timelines, root cause, attacker methodology) defer to defense-dfir-triage, defense-malware-triage, defense-log-analysis; here the only objective is finding the flag in the haystack.

Why it works

CTF forensics artifacts are constructed, not organic: the flag was placed by an author using a standard technique (appended data, an HTTP download, a deleted file, an LSB embedding), and each technique has a canonical tool. Running the standard battery in order surfaces the planted artifact faster than clever hypotheses, because the author used the same tools you have.