I have found Excel to be quite useful for collecting data, doing summary analysis of logs, etc. I also liked this blog post from Mandiant, about using Excel to timeline artefacts with very different structure. It takes a bit of work using find, left, mid, right, concat, etc, but then it is quite useful! Another good thing is that a lot of people are better at creating Excel sheets than doing XPath queries.
Anyone else using Excel for DFIR, and how do you use it?
Hi, security consultant and service developer focusing on OT and DFIR. Working for an international consulting firm, based in Europe. Originally a chemical engineer. Big fan of knowledge sharing!