acquisition-order-of-volatility SKILL.md skillA
acquisition-order-of-volatility from annatchijova/skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add annatchijova/skills/acquisition-order-of-volatility@git:20260825.8500180Pins git:20260825.8500180 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- annatchijova/skills
- Path
acquisition-order-of-volatility/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 1
- Latest version
- git:20260825.8500180, committed Aug 25, 2026
- Size
- 7,941 bytes
- Repository stars
- 9
- License
- a license file GitHub does not identify
Collect digital evidence in order of volatility, or destroy the thing you came for — memory, network state, and running processes evaporate the moment you pull power or start "just looking," and the act of collecting alters the scene, so order and method are the evidence's admissibility, not a formality. Use whenever evidence is being captured from a live or suspect system: "acquire the disk", "grab a memory dump", "should we pull the plug or shut down gracefully", "image this machine…
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Acquisition Order of Volatility The evidence you most need is the evidence that disappears fastest. The contents of RAM, the live network connections, the running process list, the routing and ARP tables — all of it is gone the instant someone pulls power or, almost as bad, starts poking at the box to "see what's going on." Disk survives; volatile state does not. So the first law of acquisition is not "make a copy" — it is **collect in order of volatility**, most-perishable first, because the order is the difference between having the evidence and having overwritten it. The second law follows from the first: **the act of collecting alters the scene.** Mounting a filesystem writes access times; running a tool allocates memory over the very RAM you wanted; opening a file changes its metadata. You cannot observe the system without touching it, so the discipline is to *minimize and record* your footprint, not to pretend you left none. The two failure modes that ruin evidence before analysis even begins: - **The "quick look."** An analyst logs in, browses the disk, runs a few commands, reboots to "check something" — and overwrites the memory, the timestamps, and the …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add annatchijova/skills/acquisition-order-of-volatility@sha256:457b5d07ce6dfc5fThe line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260825.8500180, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_4kg5ltevzglnmr3v)
4 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Aug 25, 2026.
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (7941 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
annatchijova/skills · 9 stars · license a license file GitHub does not identify · pushed 2026-11-02 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_4kg5ltevzglnmr3v GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=annatchijova/skills/acquisition-order-of-volatility GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/457b5d07ce6dfc5f198d5482feaaa08836cda5325b8be33666308ff7ea6a5e57
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.