Why are symbol files necessary when using WinDbg to analyze kernel dumps, and how can they be obtained offline?

Symbol files map memory addresses to function and variable names, which WinDbg requires to correctly parse the dump and enable mimilib's password extraction. Without them, WinDbg shows errors like 'Kernel symbols are WRONG'. Symbols can be downloaded automatically by setting `_NT_SYMBOL_PATH` to `srv*c:\mysymbol*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols`. For offline environments, use SymChk on a connected machine to generate a manifest file, then download symbols and copy them to the target system. This process is covered in the original article Penetration Techniques - Extracting Passwords from Dump Files Using Mimilib.