Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Book Image

Practical Windows Forensics

Overview of this book

Over the last few years, the wave of the cybercrime has risen rapidly. We have witnessed many major attacks on the governmental, military, financial, and media sectors. Tracking all these attacks and crimes requires a deep understanding of operating system operations, how to extract evident data from digital evidence, and the best usage of the digital forensic tools and techniques. Regardless of your level of experience in the field of information security in general, this book will fully introduce you to digital forensics. It will provide you with the knowledge needed to assemble different types of evidence effectively, and walk you through the various stages of the analysis process. We start by discussing the principles of the digital forensics process and move on to show you the approaches that are used to conduct analysis. We will then study various tools to perform live analysis, and go through different techniques to analyze volatile and non-volatile data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Practical Windows Forensics
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Memory analysis


After a successful memory acquisition process, the investigator will have a single dump file that contains the full memory. Fortunately, the structure of the memory can be parsed by many analysis programs, including volatility, which is the most famous memory analysis framework nowadays.

The volatility framework

A free memory forensics framework can be downloaded from http://www.volatilityfoundation.org. This framework supports many versions of Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. An independent book called Art of Memory Forensics was released with volatility 2.4. It explains in detail different operating systems' artifacts in memory and how to extract and analyze them using the volatility framework. In this section, we will discuss the usage of volatility framework and how it detects the malicious activities in memory dump.

Each operating system has a different memory structure. Volatility has the ability to understand different structures. Using this profile, volatility...