hunting-evtx-with-chainsaw

hunting-evtx-with-chainsaw is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from adriannoes/awesome-agentic-ai. It costs 24 tokens per session (2,009 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to using Chainsaw, an offline tool for searching Windows event-log files and other forensic data. It can apply Sigma detection rules, which are shared patterns for spotting suspicious activity, and search for matching words or expressions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to scan EVTX files, search for suspicious events, check artifacts such as Shimcache and SRUM, and export findings as tables, CSV, or JSON.
Why use it?
It lets investigators quickly examine collected logs without first sending them to a central monitoring system. This helps identify possible threats during the first stage of an investigation.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is ./target/release/chainsaw --version.

Good fit Use it to scan EVTX files, search for suspicious events, check artifacts such as Shimcache and SRUM, and export findings as tables, CSV, or JSON.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/adriannoes/awesome-agentic-ai
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/adriannoes/awesome-agentic-ai/hunting-evtx-with-chainsaw

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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README.md
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Your own site
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Your own site · 80×15
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Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,009 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high YARA Match · line 121
    YARA rule matched a known malware signature (reverse shell, backdoor, ransomware, C2 framework, or info stealer).
    Fix: Remove the malware payload or compromised file entirely. Investigate how it entered the skill and audit all other artifacts for additional indicators of compromise.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00024 $0.02009
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.01005
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00402
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00201

Measured 9d ago against content hash 9d2b204949d7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hunting-evtx-with-chainsaw scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/agent.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

cursor-claude-codex/skills/anthropic-cybersecurity-skills/skills/hunting-evtx-with-chainsaw/SKILL.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Hunting EVTX with Chainsaw

Overview

Chainsaw is a fast, Rust-based forensic artifact search and hunting tool from WithSecure Labs. It provides first-response capability to rapidly identify threats within Windows Event Logs (.evtx) and other artifacts. Chainsaw can hunt with the full SigmaHQ rule corpus (translating Sigma to its internal Tau engine), run its own built-in detection rules, perform high-speed keyword/regex search across logs, and analyse specialized artifacts such as the AppCompatCache (shimcache), SRUM database, and event-log gaps. Output can be a colorized table, CSV, or JSON for downstream tooling.

Chainsaw's strength is speed and flexibility during initial triage: an analyst can drop a folder of collected EVTX onto the tool and get back a prioritized set of detections in seconds, then pivot with targeted search queries to confirm a hypothesis. Unlike a SIEM, it needs no ingestion pipeline, runs as a single binary, and works fully offline against acquired evidence — ideal for the field or an air-gapped analysis VM. The --mapping file tells Chainsaw how Sigma fields translate to Windows event fields, which is what enables broad Sigma coverage over EVTX.

A common hunt outcome is detecting suspicious PowerShell — MITRE ATT&CK T1059.001 (Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell) — by running Sigma rules against PowerShell operational logs (Event ID 4104 script-block logging) or searching for encoded-command patterns. This skill maps to NIST CSF DE.AE-02 (potentially adverse events are analyzed to better understand associated activities).

When to Use

  • During first-response triage to rapidly hunt threats across collected Windows event logs.
  • When you need offline Sigma-based detection over .evtx without standing up a SIEM.
  • To run fast keyword/regex searches confirming or refuting a hunt hypothesis.
  • To analyse shimcache, SRUM, or event-log time gaps for execution evidence and tampering.
  • To produce CSV/JSON detection output for reporting or pipeline ingestion.

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 179 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 9d2b204949d7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hunting-evtx-with-chainsaw is a skill published in the GitHub repository adriannoes/awesome-agentic-ai (57 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 2,009 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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