Thenetstat -abcommand is useful in Windows operating systems for displaying all connections and listening ports, along with the executable involved in creating each connection or listening port. This can be particularly valuable for an incident responder like James when attempting to determine which processes are running on a system and how they are communicating over the network. This information can help identify malicious processes, unauthorized connections, or other signs of compromise on the system. Whilenetstat -abdoes not exclusively list executable files for running processes, it ties processes to network activity, which is a critical part of collecting volatile information during a cybersecurity incident investigation.

References:The Certified Incident Handler (CREST CPTIA) course by EC-Council covers various commands and tools that can be used to collect volatile data from systems as part of incident response activities, highlighting the importance of understanding network connections and the processes responsible for them.