An investigator performing an initial analysis of a memory image identified a suspicious URL while using the strings utility. A second investigator attempting to recreate the results cannot find the…

Password protection on a memory image would prevent the file from being read at all, not selectively hide individual strings within it.

A compressed memory image would produce only garbled binary output and no readable strings would be found by either investigator.

ASCII is precisely what the default `strings` command searches for; if the URL were in ASCII format, the second investigator would have found it without any additional flags.

On Windows systems, strings such as URLs embedded in processes or memory are commonly stored as UTF-16 little-endian, where each character is represented by two bytes with a null byte between them. The default `strings` command interprets only single-byte ASCII sequences, so it skips these multi-byte characters entirely. The first investigator likely used `strings -e l` (little-endian 16-bit) to extract the Unicode URL, while the second investigator used the default ASCII-only mode.