Book Image

Learning Malware Analysis

By : Monnappa K A
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning Malware Analysis

5 (1)
By: Monnappa K A

Overview of this book

Malware analysis and memory forensics are powerful analysis and investigation techniques used in reverse engineering, digital forensics, and incident response. With adversaries becoming sophisticated and carrying out advanced malware attacks on critical infrastructures, data centers, and private and public organizations, detecting, responding to, and investigating such intrusions is critical to information security professionals. Malware analysis and memory forensics have become must-have skills to fight advanced malware, targeted attacks, and security breaches. This book teaches you the concepts, techniques, and tools to understand the behavior and characteristics of malware through malware analysis. It also teaches you techniques to investigate and hunt malware using memory forensics. This book introduces you to the basics of malware analysis, and then gradually progresses into the more advanced concepts of code analysis and memory forensics. It uses real-world malware samples, infected memory images, and visual diagrams to help you gain a better understanding of the subject and to equip you with the skills required to analyze, investigate, and respond to malware-related incidents.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

3. Volatility Overview


Once you acquire the memory of an infected system, the next step is to analyze the acquired memory image. Volatility (http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/releases) is an open source advanced memory forensics framework written in Python that allows you to analyze and extract digital artifacts from the memory image. Volatility can run on various platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux), and it supports analysis of memory from 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.

3.1 Installing Volatility

Volatility is distributed in several formats, and it can be downloaded from http://www.volatilityfoundation.org/releases. At the time of writing this book, the latest version of Volatility is version 2.6. Depending on the operating system that you intend to run Volatility on, follow the installation procedure for the appropriate operating system.

3.1.1 Volatility Standalone Executable

The fastest way to get started with Volatility is to use the standalone...