Fleet Hunting with Velociraptor

Authorized Use Only: Velociraptor agents provide deep endpoint visibility and remote collection. Deploy only on assets you own or are authorized to monitor, in accordance with your monitoring policy and applicable law.

Overview

Velociraptor is an open-source endpoint visibility and digital-forensics platform from Rapid7/Velocidex. A single Go binary acts as server, client (agent), and CLI depending on how it is invoked and configured. Its power comes from VQL (Velociraptor Query Language) — an SQL-like language whose plugins query the live state of an endpoint (processes, files, registry, event logs, WMI, network connections, prefetch, etc.). VQL queries are packaged into reusable Artifacts, and Artifacts are run at scale as Hunts that fan out across every connected client and stream results back to the server as structured rows.

This makes Velociraptor ideal for fleet-wide threat hunting: a hypothesis ("are any hosts running suspicious PowerShell?") becomes a VQL artifact, deployed as a hunt, with results aggregated centrally in minutes. It also supports offline collectors (standalone executables that collect and bundle artifacts on air-gapped or unmanaged hosts) and live forensic notebooks.

When to Use

• Hunting for a TTP across hundreds or thousands of endpoints from a single console.
• Collecting forensic artifacts on demand during incident response without re-imaging.
• Continuously monitoring for an indicator using client-side event artifacts.
• Generating standalone offline collectors for hosts you cannot enroll.

Prerequisites

• A Linux or Windows host for the server (Linux recommended for production).
• The Velociraptor binary from the official release page: https://github.com/Velocidex/velociraptor/releases
• Outbound/inbound connectivity from clients to the server frontend port (default 8000) and admin GUI (default 8889).
• Make the binary executable on Linux:

  chmod +x velociraptor-v0.*-linux-amd64
  sudo mv velociraptor-v0.*-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/velociraptor
  

Objectives

• Generate server and client configurations.
• Run the server frontend and admin GUI.
• Enroll clients across the fleet.
• Author and test VQL hunts.
• Launch a fleet-wide hunt and collect results.
• Produce an offline collector for unmanaged hosts.

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Velociraptor is a defensive hunting platform; the mapping reflects the adversary behavior the hunts are designed to detect.

Workflow

1. Generate the server configuration

The interactive generator writes a server config (TLS, datastore paths, GUI users, frontend URL). Use config generate for a self-signed lab build or the interactive -i wizard for production.

# Non-interactive: dump a default server config
velociraptor config generate > server.config.yaml

# Interactive wizard (recommended for production deployments)
velociraptor config generate -i

2. Add a GUI admin user

Create at least one administrator to log into the console.

velociraptor --config server.config.yaml user add admin --role administrator

3. Start the server frontend and GUI

The frontend accepts client connections; the GUI is served per the config (default https://127.0.0.1:8889).

velociraptor --config server.config.yaml frontend -v

For a quick all-in-one local lab (server + frontend + a local client in one process):

velociraptor gui

4. Generate the client configuration and deploy agents

Derive the client config from the server config and run it as the client on each endpoint.

# Produce the client config (embeds server URL + CA)
velociraptor --config server.config.yaml config client > client.config.yaml

# On a Linux endpoint, run as a client (or install as a service)
velociraptor --config client.config.yaml client -v

On Windows, build an MSI/service installer from the GUI ("Server Artifacts" > deployment) or run:

velociraptor.exe --config client.config.yaml service install

5. Test VQL interactively before hunting

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