Author Archives: Michael Karsyan

Windows boot performance diagnostics. Part 1

Have you ever seen that your computer starts booting slowly? Or it slowly restores its state from hibernation. Maybe you observe performance issues when shutdown or hibernate process? In this article, I will show you how you can use Event Log Explorer to find performance problems linked with the startup/shutdown/hibernate/resume processes.

Starting from Windows Vista, Microsoft provides a bunch of event logs for different system purposes. In Windows Event Viewer, these logs are located in a special branch: “Applications and Services Logs”. Windows records performance diagnostics events into Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational event log. To open this log in Windows Event Viewer, open Applications and Services Logs branch, then open Microsoft, then open Windows, then select Diagnostics-Performance and click on Operational. In Event Log Explorer you can do it easier: open your computer in the tree, then open Microsoft-Windows folder and then click Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational.

Now you can see a list of different diagnostic events. As you can see, events with the same event ID may have different types – Warning, Error and Critical. It looks like these event types depend on the duration of the startup/shutdown process. Another observation – theses events contain many important parameters internally, but you can’t see them in the event description (Windows Event Viewer doesn’t display them as well). The only way to display these parameters is to double click on the event to display event properties and switch to XML tab.

Compare:

Unfortunately, I didn’t find a detailed documentation about all these events, so I did some research. First, I got meaning of events in Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance:

Event ID	Event Description
Boot Performance Monitoring
100	Windows has started up
101	This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process
102	This driver took longer to initialize, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process
103	This startup service took longer than expected to startup, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process
104	Core system took longer to initialize, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process
105	Foreground optimizations (prefetching) took longer to complete, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process
106	Background optimizations (prefetching) took longer to complete, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process
107	Application of machine policy caused a slow down in the system start up process
108	Application of user policy caused a slow down in the system start up process
109	This device took longer to initialize, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process
110	Session manager initialization caused a slow down in the startup process
Shutdown Performance Monitoring
200	Windows has shutdown
201	This application caused a delay in the system shutdown process
202	This device caused a delay in the system shutdown process
203	This service caused a delay in the system shutdown process
Standby Performance Monitoring
300	Windows has resumed from standby
301	This application caused a delay during standby
302	This driver caused a delay during standby while servicing a device
303	This service caused a delay during hybrid-sleep
304	Creation of the hiber-file was slower than expected
305	Persisting disk caches was slower than expected
306	Preparing the video subsystem for sleep was slower than expected
307	Preparing Winlogon for sleep was slower than expected
308	Preparing system memory for sleep was slower than expected
309	Preparing core system for sleep was slower than expected
310	Preparing system worker threads for sleep was slower than expected
350	Bios initialization time was greater than 250ms (logo requirement) during system resume
351	This driver responded slower than expected to the resume request while servicing this device
352	Reading the hiber-file was slower than expected
System Performance Monitoring
400	Information about the system performance monitoring event
401	This process is using up processor time and is impacting the performance of Windows
402	This process is doing excessive disk activities and is impacting the performance of Windows
403	This driver is using up too many resources and is impacting the performance of Windows
404	This driver is waiting longer than expected on a device
405	This file is fragmented and is impacting the performance of Windows
406	Disk IO to this file is taking longer than expected
407	This process is using up too much system memory
408	Many processes are using too much system memory
Desktop Window Manager Monitoring
500	The Desktop Window Manager is experiencing heavy resource contention
501	The Desktop Window Manager is experiencing heavy resource contention

Since we research boot/shutdown/standby/resume performance, we should pay attention to 1xx, 2xx and 3xx events. We can see that events 100, 200 and 300 are basic events followed by 1xx, 2xx and 3xx which give extra information about the problem.

E.g. I can see two events

Event 100 :

Windows has started up:
    Boot Duration        :              34857ms
    IsDegradation        :              0
    Incident Time (UTC)  :              18.11.2015 23:58:10

Event 102:

This driver took longer to initialize, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process:
    File Name             :              mssmbios
    Friendly Name         :              System Management BIOS Driver
    Version               :              6.1.7600.16385 (win7_rtm.090713-1255)
    Total Time            :              1027ms
    Degradation Time      :              1026ms
    Incident Time (UTC)   :              18.11.2015 23:58:10

So we can see that System Management BIOS Driver caused the delay in the system boot up.

Unfortunately sometimes events 100, 200 and 300 occur alone without followed events. In this case it is impossible to detect the reason of the delay using Diagnostics-Performance event log.

You should pay attention to parameters of Event 100 (Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance):

                 
 System
 ...
 EventData          
                 BootTsVersion 2
                 BootStartTime  2015-11-18T20:58:10.671600300Z
                 BootEndTime    2015-11-18T20:58:10.671600300Z
                 SystemBootInstance     89
                 UserBootInstance          84
                 BootTime           34857
                 MainPathBootTime       12657
                 BootKernelInitTime      21
                 BootDriverInitTime       3101
                 BootDevicesInitTime    18
                 BootPrefetchInitTime  0
                 BootPrefetchBytes        0
                 BootAutoChkTime         0
                 BootSmssInitTime          5084
                 BootCriticalServicesInitTime    436
                 BootUserProfileProcessingTime             2683
                 BootMachineProfileProcessingTime    0
                 BootExplorerInitTime   848
                 BootNumStartupApps  24
                 BootPostBootTime        22200
                 BootIsRebootAfterInstall           false
                 BootRootCauseStepImprovementBits 0
                 BootRootCauseGradualImprovementBits          0
                 BootRootCauseStepDegradationBits    4
                 BootRootCauseGradualDegradationBits             0
                 BootIsDegradation         False
                 BootIsStepDegradation               false
                 BootIsGradualDegradation        false
                 BootImprovementDelta              0
                 BootDegradationDelta 0
                 BootIsRootCauseIdentified       true
                 OSLoaderDuration         735
                 BootPNPInitStartTimeMS           21
                 BootPNPInitDuration    1342
                 OtherKernelInitDuration            332
                 SystemPNPInitStartTimeMS     1665
                 SystemPNPInitDuration              1776
                 SessionInitStartTimeMS             3451
                 Session0InitDuration    2088
                 Session1InitDuration    339
                 SessionInitOtherDuration          2656
                 WinLogonStartTimeMS               8536
                 OtherLogonInitActivityDuration             587
                 UserLogonWaitDuration             3551

Most of parameters are self-descriptive.

Pay attention that BootTime= MainPathBootTime + BootPostBootTime

MainPathBootTime is the time (in milliseconds) from when the Windows Logo first appears on screen and until your desktop or logon prompt is presented.

BootPostBootTime is the time (in milliseconds) from the logon screen or desktop showing up and until the system become actually usable (the system has reached 80% idle).

In many cases (but not in my sample), the problem with long boot time is linked with Windows Prefetcher – you will see that BootPrefetchInitTime is set to a large value, e.g. 60000 or more. In this case you can play with Superfetch service and Superfetch caching parameters (registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters). If you have just changed your HDD or SSD, you should re-run the assessment in Performance Information and Tools applet (or just run Winsat command as winsat.exe diskformal) to make Windows use the best prefetch strategy.

Now you have some background information about Diagnostics-Performance events. In the next part I will show how Event Log Explorer helps to detect boot performance issues.

Event Log Explorer Forensic Edition Preview

Several days ago, we published a preview of the new edition of Event Log Explorer software – Forensic Edition! Here I will show what benefits you can get from this edition. First, I should say that currently it is fully compatible with the standard edition of Event Log Explorer – it uses the same workspace, the same settings and currently the same registration key. By default, it installs itself into another folder, so you can use both editions concurrently. By the way, the forensic edition preview is available at
http://eventlogxp.com/download/elex_fe_setup.exe

What should you pay attention to?

You can find a new button on the tool bar – Add imaged computer.

How it works. When you have a forensic image, you can mount it as a disk on your computer. And this command lets you add this imaged computer to the tree, and then view event logs from it.

Example:
I currently don’t have forensic images, but I have an old hard drive and connected it to my computer for tests. It is drive E:. I click “Add imaged computer” button and get this dialog:

Event Log Explore tries to detect a mounted system drive automatically – it found it in my case, but if it wouldn’t find, just type correct path to the Windows folder on the mounted disk.

Type any name in “Friendly name” field, and press OK.

Now you can see that this “computer” has been added to the tree and you can open it and view event logs.
Let’s try to open any log from this imaged computer, e.g. Application. Double click on Application and the event log will appear as a log file.

Pay attention to the icon that appears on the log icons area. Commonly it appears when you set a description server. But now it notifies you that Event Log Explorer will try to get descriptions from the mounted disk, when if it failed to find them locally. Whenever Event Log Explorer tries to get event description, it will try to get it locally first (as always), but if the description is not available, it will open registry on the mounted disk, find a resource file that contains event description and try to extract the description from this file. Note that if you research this disk not only with help of Event Log Explorer, but with e.g. Registry Editor and opened registry files (loaded them as hives), you should unload the hives, or Event Log Explorer won’t be able to open them. If you want disable getting descriptions from the imaged computer, just double click on that icon and uncheck “If no description available, get it from imaged disk” option.

What else

We disabled functionality that lets you modify event logs, such us clear log command, modifying event log properties.

What’s next?

We are planning to add the following features to forensic edition:

Timeline creation
Opening heavily damaged evtx files
Opening evt and evtx fragments
Features you will requested to add!

Exporting event logs with Windows PowerShell

Do you need to automate error reporting based on recent events and don’t want to use third-party tools? This article describes how to collect events from different sources and unite them in one document using standard Windows instruments only.

Recently I described how to export events into Excel format using our Event Log Explorer software. However, in some cases, using third-party software can be impossible. This may happen if your company doesn’t have budget to purchase event log utilities, or such utilities are restricted by the company’s rules. In any case, the task of regular exporting the recent events from different machines into one legible file is still crucial. That’s why I will show how you can get the events from different Windows machines and export them into one file for further investigation.

Task

Let’s take the same task we solved previously. We have 4 Windows servers and we need to generate weekly reports of Error and Warning events in Application and System event logs. We should utilize only standard Windows instruments.

Instruments

Microsoft features Windows PowerShell as a framework to automate different administrative tasks and perform configuration management in Windows. My scripts require at least PowerShell version 3.0. If your PowerShell is outdated, you can update it by downloading Windows Management Framework from Microsoft’s site. To check PowerShell version simply type in PowerShell console:

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

In my case, PowerShell version = 3 which is OK.

Research

To access event logs, Windows PowerShell comes with Get-EventLog cmdlet:

Parameter Set: LogName
Get-EventLog [-LogName] <String> [[-InstanceId] <Int64[]> ] 
[-After <DateTime> ] [-AsBaseObject] [-Before <DateTime> ] 
[-ComputerName <String[]> ] [-EntryType <String[]> ] 
[-Index <Int32[]> ] [-Message <String> ] [-Newest <Int32> ] 
[-Source <String[]> ] [-UserName <String[]> ] [<CommonParameters>]

First we need to define the start date (the date after which we will get events). This date is calculated as today minus 7 days:

$now=get-date
$startdate=$now.adddays(-7)

Now we can read warning and error events from a log for the last week:

$el = get-eventlog -ComputerName Serv1 -log System -After $startdate -EntryType Error, Warning

Let’s check the result. Just type $el in the console. Yes, we can see events from the event log.
But how will we export the event log? Windows PowerShell doesn’t have cmdlets to export to Excel. But it supports export to CSV file. Let’s try it now:

$el | export-csv eventlog.csv

Yes, it works, but multi-line descriptions ruined the output file.
Maybe export to XML will help?

$el | export-clixml eventlog.xml

But how to display it in clear way? Excel understands XML files, but I have no idea how to interpret it:

I guess we can make an XML transformation to convert this XML into more readable file, but I’m not an XML guru, but I have a more or less useful solution. We can solve our problem if we just export to CSV only several event properties (without event description):

$el |Select EntryType, TimeGenerated, Source, EventID | Export-CSV eventlog.csv -NoTypeInfo

Now we can read eventlog.csv in Excel without problems.

Putting all together

It’s time to write the PowerShell script.
Brief: we will read recent (7 days) error and warning events from Application and System event logs, join them, sort them by time and export to CSV format.

#
#  This script exports consolidated and filtered event logs to CSV
#  Author: Michael Karsyan, FSPro Labs, eventlogxp.com (c) 2016
#

Set-Variable -Name EventAgeDays -Value 7     #we will take events for the latest 7 days
Set-Variable -Name CompArr -Value @("SERV1", "SERV2", "SERV3", "SERV4")   # replace it with your server names
Set-Variable -Name LogNames -Value @("Application", "System")  # Checking app and system logs
Set-Variable -Name EventTypes -Value @("Error", "Warning")  # Loading only Errors and Warnings
Set-Variable -Name ExportFolder -Value "C:\TEST\"


$el_c = @()   #consolidated error log
$now=get-date
$startdate=$now.adddays(-$EventAgeDays)
$ExportFile=$ExportFolder + "el" + $now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd---hh-mm-ss") + ".csv"  # we cannot use standard delimiteds like ":"

foreach($comp in $CompArr)
{
  foreach($log in $LogNames)
  {
    Write-Host Processing $comp\$log
    $el = get-eventlog -ComputerName $comp -log $log -After $startdate -EntryType $EventTypes
    $el_c += $el  #consolidating
  }
}
$el_sorted = $el_c | Sort-Object TimeGenerated    #sort by time
Write-Host Exporting to $ExportFile
$el_sorted|Select EntryType, TimeGenerated, Source, EventID, MachineName | Export-CSV $ExportFile -NoTypeInfo  #EXPORT
Write-Host Done!

Scheduling the task

To run the script, we should run this command:

PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File export-logs.ps1

We can open Windows scheduler GUI to make this task, or use PowerShell console:
Microsoft recommends this way to schedule a PowerShell script:

$Trigger=New-JobTrigger -Weekly -At “7:00AM” -DaysOfWeek “Monday”
Register-ScheduledJob -Name “Export Logs” -FilePath “C:\Test\export-logs.ps1” -Trigger $Trigger

But this may miswork, because it adds to Windows Task Scheduler the following action:

powershell.exe -NoLogo -NonInteractive -WindowStyle Hidden -Command “Import-Module PSScheduledJob; $jobDef = [Microsoft.PowerShell.ScheduledJob.ScheduledJobDefinition]::LoadFromStore(‘Export Logs’, ‘C:\Users\Michael\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\ScheduledJobs’); $jobDef.Run()”

If your policy prevents running PoweShell scripts, our export script won’t run because powershell parameters miss -ExecutionPolicy option.
That’s why I will use ScriptBlock instead of FilePath. This code does the trick:

$trigger=New-JobTrigger -Weekly -At "7:00AM" -DaysOfWeek "Monday"
$action="PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File c:\test\export-logs.ps1"
$sb=[Scriptblock]::Create($action)
Register-ScheduledJob -Name "Export Logs" -ScriptBlock $sb -Trigger $trigger

Note that to run Register-ScheduledJob cmdlet, you need to start PowerShell elevated.
That’s all. Now you should have a task that runs every Monday at 7:00, collects events from your servers and exports them to CSV files.

Conclusion

As you can see, the problem of exporting events to Excel can be solved without third-party tools. This method is somewhat limited, but it works.

Case study – generating regular reports about the problems in your Windows network

Recently one of our clients asked us about the best way to organize a passive monitoring of their servers. The client told us that they don’t need to monitor the servers actively, but they want to have weekly reports about the problems. They tried to gather events using Windows PowerShell and export them to CSV format (to view events in Excel), but finally they gave up.

Task

The customer reported that he is a system administrator of a network with 4 Windows 2008 Severs and he needs to check out only system and application event logs of these servers. Ideally, these machines should generate only information events (no error or warnings). He would like to have reports of the problems in the beginning of every week.

So we can reformulate the task as follows:

Generate weekly report of all non-Information events in Application and System logs.

Our solution

First of all, we suggest to start a new copy of Event Log Explorer and create a new workspace for this task (use File->New workspace command). You can ignore this suggestion, but we recommend to always separate long-running tasks (like active monitoring or scheduled tasks) from operative event log tasks.

Then we need to add the required servers to the tree. This can be done either with help of Add Computer Wizards or manually (by pressing Add computer button).

It’s time to create our log view. We will consolidate all the application and system logs from these servers in one view.

Open Serv1 server in the tree and double click on System log to open in.

We can subsequently add other event logs to the view, but it is better to set on-load filter first. Go to View->Log Loading Options, select Load event from last 7 days (we need a report for the last week) and untick Information type.

Now we can add other logs to the view and they will be filtered automatically:

Right click on Application log of Serv1 and select Merge with the current view. Open Serv2, Serv3 and Serv4 and continue to add their application and system logs to the view.

Click on Date column to sort all merged events by date and time.

Rename unclear “Merger” name to something better: select View->Rename and change the name to “Weekly report“.

Now you should get something like this:

Let’s automate this.

Select Advanced->Scheduler from the main menu and create a new task. Name the task as “Problem Report” and click Next.

Set when we want to run the task, e.g. on Mondays at 7:00:

Click Next and select what we want to do: Refresh, then export:

We will export to Excel 2007 format with event descriptions.

Leave “Export path” with the default value “%USERPROFILE%\Documents” which means that Event Log Explorer will save reports in Documents folder of your user profile (note that in Export path you can enter any Windows path, including UNC paths, so it lets you store reports on remote computers).

Click Next, then Finish and then OK in Scheduler window. Now you can save the workspace (File->Save workspace) and minimize the application (you can minimize it even into the notification area).

That’s all. On Monday at 7:00 AM, Event Log Explorer will load error and warning events for the last week from the servers and export these events into XSLX file:

And even if you close the program or restart your PC, you can always run Event Log Explorer and open your workspace – this will load all your settings and restore the scheduler.

Conclusion

As you can see, tuning Event Log Explorer didn’t take a lot of time (I did it in just 4 minutes), and what is more important you will have regular reports about problems from different sources without extra work! Needless to say that you can easily modify event filters to fulfill your specific requirements.

Forensics and Benford’s Law

As a producer of digital forensic software, we are regularly learning more about forensic methods and tasks. Recently I came across a curious article (and video) in Business Insider called “How forensic accountants use Benford’s Law to detect fraud”

The video states that forensic guys can use Benford’s Law to analyze financial data and identify red flags.

This sounds interesting because it is too easy to check if a set of data obeys this law. Let’s do some checks.

Benford’s Law is a phenomenological law about the frequency distribution of leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data. Mathematically it can be written asd – the leading digit
P(d) – probability that a number begins with d.

For d from 1 to 9, we can calculate probabilities as follows:

It is stated in the article that Benford’s Law works good for values which are results of multiplication, division and raising to a power, which are common for financial calculations.

Microsoft Excel helps us to verify this with no efforts. I will multiply 2 random values and divide it to another random value: RANDBETWEEN(1,99)* RANDBETWEEN(1,99)/ RANDBETWEEN(1,99)

and calculate the distribution for 500 values.

Great! This really looks like Benford’s Law distribution. And this may really help in forensic investigation when analyzing calculated values. If you are interested how I extracted the first digit from a number – it’s very easy:
NUMBERVALUE(LEFT(TEXT(A2,0),1))

But the article’s video starts from the statement that the population of every US county obeys to this law as well. Although I understand, that we can predict demographic values using math formulas, this sounds weird. Since the population of US obeys to this law, I guess this should work for the world population. Let’s check it.

I was skeptical about the result, but it really looks like Bedford’s Law distribution!

Ok, if it works with population, maybe it will work with similar entities, but specific to digital forensics. First, I thought about event logs, e.g. number of events in the log. But obviously it won’t work, because event logs are limited by size. In my example, when the event log grows, the first digit will be always ‘2’ till you clear the log.

Moreover, Windows commonly uses only few event logs, so we won’t get any statistical significance. And of course Benford’s Law won’t work if we test Event ID numbers – they have solely artificial nature and it’s up to developer to choose an identifier for event.

But what about files. What if we test it with file size – will it work? If it works for test samples, we will be able to suppose that if the investigation case files don’t obey the law, someone could remove many files. I will test it with C:\Windows folder and its subfolders on my PC (it contains more than 100 000 files). By the way, since Windows keeps event log files in C:\Windows\System32\winevt\Logs and these files are limited by size, it may affect the statistics. Hopefully there are only about 150 files in Logs folder, so this effect is not significant. We will take size of every file in kilobytes.

Well, it is really similar to Benford’s Law distribution. But one sample is not enough to make conclusions. It is interesting that in all my cases, we can see a small hump at 7 or 8 digits.

Let us summarize what we researched here. Benford’s Law works for big volumes of data that are the result of certain calculations, like financial results. It works with some statistical data. It may work for some specific digital data – although my test shows that it works for file size, it should be rechecked with other sets of data. Probably it will work with other digital data which digital forensic investigator may get as evidence. However this method won’t work for neat frauds. If only a small part of data modified, the distribution won’t show any significant deviation. In case of financial fraud, if a malefactor modified the original data and recalculate all the results, I suppose that the new set of data will obey the law.

Therefore, as any forensic instrument, Benford’s Law has its own applications, but it is not a panacea.

Once again about custom columns – extracting details from Application or System event logs

In my article “Exploring who logged on the system“, I described how to add to the event list custom columns that display data from the event description. Probably you might think that adding custom columns works for Security event logs only. Although we initially designed Custom columns feature exactly for Security logs (and referred them by name, e.g. Subject\Account name), we made it possible to use it with any logs.

Let’s take a typical system engineer or administrator task to discover faulty applications on the system. We will search for application error events. Such events are stored in Application event log, event source is “Application Error” and they are commonly registered with Event ID=1000. Therefore, we need to open Application log, and refine its events:

We can see that the description of event 1000 is not so well-structured as descriptions in Security log:

so it is impossible to refer description parameters by name.

However, we can still refer these parameters by number as {PARAM[x]}.

Look at the event description. The application name and its version is in the very beginning:

Faulting application name: googledrivesync.exe, version: 1.27.1227.2094, time stamp: 0x509418e4

Most likely, we will refer app name as PARAM[1] and its version as PARAM[2], but let’s make sure.

Double click on an event to get Event Properties and switch to XML tab.

Yes, we can see that googledrivesync.exe 1.27.1227.2094 are the first and the second parameters respectively.

In this example, I will display app name and version number in one column as googledrivesync.exe ver 1.27.1227.2094, but you can try 2 columns (for name and version #) or get rid of version number at all.
Open Custom columns dialog (View->Custom columns).

Title the column as Faulty app
Leave Event source and Event ID(s) blank (your log is filtered).
Set Value to {PARAM[1]} ver {PARAM[2]}
Press OK and enjoy the result!

Advanced filtering. How to filter events by event description

A key instrument for event logs analysis is the function of event filtering. All known event log analysis tools have filtering feature, and I suppose, it is the most demanded feature of these applications. Setting filter for the most of event fields is easy. As a rule, all the event log applications let you filter by timeframe, event level, source, event IDs, users or computers with a more or less friendly user interface.

However, sometimes you may need to filter events by extra details, which you can see in the event description. Let’s take the task of displaying logon events from RDP users. Previously I described how to display all the logon events, but now we need to make a more complex filter.

We know that logon events are 4624 and 4625 (successful logon and unsuccessful logon attempt). In this post, I showed how to interpret logon types and you can see that Logon type for RDP access is 10. So we need to filter by event ID= 4624 or 4625 and Logon type = 10. And this filter should be applied to Security log.

Although Windows Event Viewer does not provide user interface to filter events by extra event details, you can query event log by using structured XML queries. This feature is available since Windows 2008/Vista. Structured XML query is a special language based on XPath 1.0 syntax intended to retrieve events from event logs. You can find information about the structured XML queries and XPath expressions at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd996910(v=vs.85).aspx

Here is a XML filter query for our task:

<QueryList>
<Query Id=”0″ Path=”Security”>
<Select Path=”Security”>
*[System[(EventID=4624 or EventID=4625)]]
and
*[EventData[Data[@Name=’LogonType’] and Data=10]]
</Select>
</Query>
</QueryList>

Using the power of XML query, you may filter events by virtually any criteria. Our Event Log Explorer “understands” the structured XML queries as well as built-in Event Viewer. But unlike Event Viewer, you don’t need to use full XML queries. Event Log Explorer accepts short XPath expressions like:

*[System[(EventID=4624 or EventID=4625)]] and
*[EventData[Data[@Name=’LogonType’] and Data=10]]

However, despite the advantages of XML filtering, it is not easy to use it, especially if you don’t used to write XML queries on a regular basis.

So now, I will show how we simplified this process with our software.

Select View->Filter from the Event Log Explorer main menu to display Filter dialog.

First of all, you should type 4624,4625 into Event ID(s) filed because we need only logon events.

Event Log Explorer provides two basic ways of filtering events by description.

Filtering events by description text

You can just type any text in “Text in description” field and Event Log Explorer will display all events that contain this text in the description. You may just try to type

Logon Type: 10

And this MAY really work. However, it is not reliable at all. You should not rely on the number of tabs inside description, moreover you cannot just type the tabulation symbols in the input line (I pasted it from the event description, and you should not copy it from this article – it won’t work – there are three tabulation symbols between “:” and “10”). Thereby, I suggest using this simple way, only for simple filters, e.g. when you need to display events containing a specific file name in the description.

The same “Text in description” filed has an extra feature when you enable RegExp checkbox near it. In this case, you can filter events with the power of regular expressions. When RegExp checkbox enabled, Event Log Explorer will search all event descriptions for occurrence of the regular expressions you typed in “Text in description” filed. Our expression should look like

Logon Type:\s*10

Logon Type:[ \t]*10

You probably think that this way is not much better than using structured XML queries. Instead of learning XPath syntax, I recommend you to learn regular expressions?

Although I don’t see alternatives to regular expression filters for some specific log analysis tasks, Event Log Explorer lets you fulfill this very task (displaying RDP logon events) much easier.

Filtering events by description parameters

Event Log Explorer gives you a user friendly ability to filter Security log by description parameters. In fact, you just tell the program the following:

Logon type equals 10

To make entering the filter condition easy, I recommend select an even in the event list that contains Logon type in the description (you should do this before opening Filter dialog).

Use Filter by description params group to create your filter conditions:

I believe that this way significantly saves your time for security log analysis.

Note that this approach works only when you analyze Security event logs because the security log descriptions are well-structured. When you analyze other logs, you may need to use regular expressions or XPath filter queries.

Invalid dates inside some events

You have probably heard that due to a date bug, it is easy to brick iPhone by changing its system date to Jan 1, 1970. If you are not aware of this issue, you may read it here. We found a very similar problem with event logging. Fortunately, nothing crashes, but the problem may stop a log from being loaded.

Recently we received a bug report that Event Log Explorer breaks loading the system event log on Windows 10 with error: “Invalid argument to date encode”. This happened only sometimes and if a log was loaded using New API. Researching the issue, we discovered that the problem is linked with Event ID = 107 of Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power (“The system resumed from sleep”). Moreover, in our time zone (GMT+3) all seems to work fine, but in GMT-5 it fails to load this event. However, Event Viewer loads this event without problems in all time zones. Really strange…

What is event 107 of Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power? At first glance, this is an absolutely harmless event – event date and time are correctly stored in the event log. The description of this event has no parameters. But let’s investigate it deeper. The event details contain additional parameters:

<EventData>
  <Data Name="TargetState">6</Data>
  <Data Name="EffectiveState">5</Data>
  <Data Name="WakeFromState">5</Data>
  <Data Name="ProgrammedWakeTimeAc">1601-01-01T00:00:00.000000000Z</Data>
  <Data Name="ProgrammedWakeTimeDc">1601-01-01T00:00:00.000000000Z</Data>
  <Data Name="WakeRequesterTypeAc">0</Data>
  <Data Name="WakeRequesterTypeDc">0</Data>
</EventData>

That’s it! Although event description doesn’t refer any event parameters, there are 7 parameters stored with the events. And the problem is obviously linked with ProgrammedWakeTimeAc and ProgrammedWakeTimeDc. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t have the detailed description of this event it the knowledgebase, but I suppose these parameters linked with a programmable system wake up when computer plugged in or on battery.

What is the exact reason of the problem? Windows Event Viewer displays all these parameters as is. But Event Log Explorer is smarter than Event Viewer. It automatically corrects times according to your time zone. So, if you are in the Western hemisphere (more correctly you are in UTC –xx time zone), Event Log Explorer will subtract something from Jan 1, 1601 (which is a starting point for Windows time) causing an error (negative value). It’s very similar to the iPhone date bug with 2 differences: the starting point for iPhone time (Unix time) is Jan 1, 1970 and Event Log Explorer does no harm.

Nevertheless it is a bug, and we immediately fixed it by checking the date/time value. If it is Jan 1, 1601 00:00, we do not apply time correction, and now it works correctly.

An updated version of Event Log Explorer is available from our site at

http://eventlogxp.com/download/elex_setup.exe

Logon type – what does it mean?

In my previous post, I explained how to display logon type for logon events in Security log and described meaning of some values. Here I will give you more information about logon types.

The descriptions of some events (4624, 4625) in Security log commonly contain some information about “logon type”, but it is too brief:

The logon type field indicates the kind of logon that occurred. The most common types are 2 (interactive) and 3 (network).

Microsoft provides more detailed description of logon types at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787567(v=ws.10).aspx (Audit Logon Events).
This topic at the Microsoft site is about logon events auditing for pre-Vista operating systems, but it looks like Logon Type constants are valid for all Windows operating systems.

Therefore, I will copy Microsoft descriptions here and add my own comments.

Logon Type 2: Interactive. A user logged on to this computer.

An event with logon type=2 occurs whenever a user logs on (or attempts to log on) a computer locally, e.g. by typing user name and password on Windows logon prompt. Events with logon type = 2 occur when a user logs on with a local or a domain account. However, if a user logs on with a domain account, this logon type will appear only when a user really authenticated in the domain (by a domain controller). In case if the DC not available, but the user provided valid domain credentials cached in the local PC, Windows will log an event with logon type = 11.

Logon type 3: Network. A user or computer logged on to this computer from the network.

The description of this logon type clearly states that the event logged when somebody accesses a computer from the network. Commonly it appears when connecting to shared resources (shared folders, printers etc.). As we learned in the previous post, the connection with logon type = 3 could be established even from a local computer.

Logon type 4: Batch. Batch logon type is used by batch servers, where processes may be executing on behalf of a user without their direct intervention.

This event type appears when a scheduled task is about to be started. E.g. if you use Windows Task Scheduler and it’s time to start a task, Windows may create a new logon session to execute this task and register logon events (4648, 4624/4625). If a task is scheduled to run only when a “designated” user is logged on, a new logon session won’t be opened and logon events won’t be logged.

Logon type 5: Service. A service was started by the Service Control Manager.

When Windows starts a service which is configured to log on as a user, Windows will create a new logon session for this service. This happens only if the service uses a “common” user account. If it uses special accounts, e.g. “Local System”, “NT AUTHORITY\LocalService” or “NT AUTHORITY\NetworkService”, Windows won’t create new logon sessions. The opened logon session will be closed when the service stops and a logoff event (4634) will be registered.
Note that event description doesn’t contain any information about the service name, process information lists only name of the service control manager (services.exe). When Audit Failure logon event (4625) is registered with logon type = 5, this commonly means that the “designated” user has changed password, and you should update service logon details.

Logon type 7: Unlock. This workstation was unlocked.

An event with logon type = 7 occurs when a user unlocks (or attempts to unlock) a previously locked workstation. Note that when a user unlocks computer, Windows creates a new logon session (or 2 logon sessions depending on the elevation conditions) and immediately closes it (with event 4634). When you are switching between logged on user accounts with Fast User Switching feature, you may think that such switching generates event 4624 with logon type = 7 because it looks like you lock and unlock workstation. However Windows generates events 4624 with logon type = 2 (interactive). When Audit Failure logon event (4625) is registered with logon type = 7, this commonly means that either you made a typo when entering the password, or someone is trying to break into the computer.

Logon type 8: NetworkCleartext. A user logged on to this computer from the network. The user’s password was passed to the authentication package in its unhashed form. The built-in authentication packages all hash credentials before sending them across the network. The credentials do not traverse the network in plaintext (also called cleartext).

I believe that you should never see logon events with logon type = 8. This event is generated when a password comes from the net as a clear text. Such events may occur when a user logs on IIS (Internet Information Services) with basic access authentication method. Transferring passwords in plaintext format is dangerous because the passwords could be sniffed and revealed. So if basic authentication is the only option for you, you should protect your network connection (using encryption protocols like SSL/TLS, creating virtual private network etc.).

Logon type 9: NewCredentials. A caller cloned its current token and specified new credentials for outbound connections. The new logon session has the same local identity, but uses different credentials for other network connections.

This event occurs when using RunAs command with /netonly option. Let’s say you need to run a program, but grant it extra permissions for network computers. E.g. you may want to run Event Log Explorer and give it additional permissions for a specific computer or a domain (this may be helpful e.g. if you want to use a specific computer as a description server in Event Log Explorer, but your current permissions is not enough to access admin resources from this server). In this case you can run Event Log Explorer normally (using your current credentials), but specify special credentials for network connections. Let’s say your computer name is “WORK” and the description server name is “SERVER”. On WORK computer you type:

runas.exe /netonly /user:server\Administrator “c:\program files\event log explorer\elex.exe”

and provide administrator’s password when prompted.

This will run Event Log Explorer even if you provided a wrong password. This happens because it uses a cloned current credentials to run the program (a new logon session will be opened). And logon event 4624 will be logged with logon type = 9 (logoff event will be logged when you quit the application). But what about SERVER? The server will register 4624 or 4625 events in Security log with logon type = 3 but only when the application from WORK computer will try to access a shared resource on the server, e.g. Event Log Explorer will try to open resource file with event descriptions.

Logon type 10: RemoteInteractive. A user logged on to this computer remotely using Terminal Services or Remote Desktop.

This logon type is similar to 2 (Interactive) but a user connects the computer from a remote machine via RDP (using Remote Desktop, Terminal Services or Remote Assistance).

Logon type 11: CachedInteractive. A user logged on to this computer with network credentials that were stored locally on the computer. The domain controller was not contacted to verify the credentials.

When users logon a domain, Windows caches users’ credentials locally so that they can log on later even if a logon server (domain controller) is unavailable. By default Windows caches 10 or 25 last logon credentials (it depends on the operating system and can be increased up to 50). When a user attempts to logon with domain account while DC is not available, Windows checks the user’s credentials with these stored hashes and logs security events 4624 or 4625 with logon type = 11.

Exploring who logged on the system

One of the most important tasks in the security event log analysis is to find out who or what logs your system on. Here I will explain how Event Log Explorer helps you to solve this task.

First, you need to make sure that Windows security auditing is enabled for logon events. You can do this using Local Security Policy or Group Policy, depending on your network environment.

Read more about Windows Security Auditing at http://eventlogxp.com/essentials/securityauditing.html

Open Security event log with Event Log Explorer. As a rule, you will get too many different events, but now we are interested in events with the following Event IDs:

4624	An account was successfully logged on
4625	An account failed to log on

There are several ways to filter events by Event ID, I prefer using Log Loading Filter:

From the main menu select View->Log Loading Options and then in Event IDs filed type
4624, 4625
then press OK.

Now you can see only several interested events, but it is still not very clear. User column displays nothing for both successful and failure events (in fact, User column is useless for Security log since Windows 2008/Vista).

All the event details are available in the event description:

One of the advantages of Event Log Explorer is Custom Columns feature. It lets you extract information from the event details and display it as a column in the event list.
Let’s add user name and logon type to the list:

Select View->Custom columns from the main menu

Adding User Name:

Give a name of the column (e.g. User Name)

You can set Event source to Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing and Event ID(s) to 4624, 4625, but since the log already filtered by these parameters you may leave these fields blank.

Now you should set Value.

There is a difference in event description between events 4624 and 4625:

New Logon:
             …
             Account Name:              Administrator
             Account Domain:            MIKE-HP

Account For Which Logon Failed:
             …
             Account Name:              Administrator
             Account Domain:            localhost

So, Account Name or Domain cannot be referenced by name, but fortunately they have the same index number, so we can reference them by index:
type
{PARAM[7]}\{PARAM[6]}
In Value field.

Adding Logon Type

In Custom Columns dialog switch to Column 2.

Give a name of the column (e.g. Logon Type).

You may leave Event Source and Event IDs empty.

Type {Logon Type}
in Value filed.

Press OK in Custom Columns dialog.

To make the view more perfect, remove useless User column:
Select View->Configure Columns and switch User off.

Now you can see that we have several successful interactive logons (Logon Type=2), two logons by a service (Logon Type=5) and a lot of failed logon attempts with Logon Type = 3 (Network logon).

Let’s check from which computers somebody tried to connect to our host:

Select View->Custom Columns from the menu.

Switch to Column 3

Give a name of the column (e.g. Remote Station).

Set Event IDs to 4625 (we need this information for invalid logon attempts only)

Type {Network Information\Workstation Name}
in Value filed.

Press OK.

Now we can find an invalid logon attempt from a remote workstation, but we also found many network logon attempts from our local computer.

Security event log contains information about the process that attempted to logon. We can also display it as a custom column:

Select View->Custom Columns from the main menu.

Switch to Column 4.

Give a name of the column (e.g. Caller Process).

Set Event IDs to 4625 (we need this for logon attempts only)

Type {Process Information\Caller Process Name}
in Value filed.

Press OK.

So, now we can see which local processes tried to logon the system as Administrator, from which workstations users tried to logon our system and who and when logged on successfully and other logging on details.