To catch a hacker in my home lab | Hacker News Reader

To catch a hacker in my home lab

marcusedmondson.com

92 pointsrisk10 comments

It might be worth explaining what an "artifact" is. I've tried searching but I can't find anything relevant.

An artifact is a term used in digital forensics to refer to any trace left on a system by an adversary. Examples are files, registry keys and event logs.

Its also anything produced by a artistic production process e.g. in software- aka build-artifacts or documentation.

As with all industries that are "birthed" by a mother-field software-security has overloaded the term inherited from its birth place industry.

In this case, its the product produced by the investigation.

> Its also anything produced by a artistic production process e.g. in software- aka build-artifacts or documentation.

You can drop "artistic" from that, as it comes with a connotation that doesn't necessarily apply. The first part of the term comes from the more general meaning of ars/art, which would nearly translate into English as "craft".

So its basically "Crafted" thing? Thanks TIL.

Or something most craftily hidden away, and discovered.

If you follow the (Latin) origin it is even wider, in Italian artifact is artefatto where while the art (arte) part is as you say, the fatto comes from fare (Latin facere) which translate to "made".

And we say "fatto ad arte" to mean that it is "intentionally made" i.e. artefatto is something that doesn't happen normally or naturally and/or does not exist in nature.

yea vastly different from a medical context where it's used to describe false positives or characteristics

Yeah, to judge from a writing point of view this is a terrible introduction. It links to a Github page with a 1 line readme although the paragraph itself says "There is a README file that has some question that can be answered based off the artifacts that are also on my Github." (That README is in a subdirectory in that git repo... I think?).

Here it is: https://github.com/medmondson44/dune/blob/main/noabar/README...

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