Book Image

Practical Memory Forensics

By : Svetlana Ostrovskaya, Oleg Skulkin
4 (1)
Book Image

Practical Memory Forensics

4 (1)
By: Svetlana Ostrovskaya, Oleg Skulkin

Overview of this book

Memory Forensics is a powerful analysis technique that can be used in different areas, from incident response to malware analysis. With memory forensics, you can not only gain key insights into the user's context but also look for unique traces of malware, in some cases, to piece together the puzzle of a sophisticated targeted attack. Starting with an introduction to memory forensics, this book will gradually take you through more modern concepts of hunting and investigating advanced malware using free tools and memory analysis frameworks. This book takes a practical approach and uses memory images from real incidents to help you gain a better understanding of the subject and develop the skills required to investigate and respond to malware-related incidents and complex targeted attacks. You'll cover Windows, Linux, and macOS internals and explore techniques and tools to detect, investigate, and hunt threats using memory forensics. Equipped with this knowledge, you'll be able to create and analyze memory dumps on your own, examine user activity, detect traces of fileless and memory-based malware, and reconstruct the actions taken by threat actors. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in memory forensics and have gained hands-on experience of using various tools associated with it.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Basics of Memory Forensics
4
Section 2: Windows Forensic Analysis
9
Section 3: Linux Forensic Analysis
13
Section 4: macOS Forensic Analysis

Chapter 7: Linux Memory Acquisition

Despite Windows being the most common desktop operating system, the role of Linux-based systems cannot be overstated. Due to their flexibility, Linux-based operating systems can be installed on a wide range of hardware: PCs, tablets, laptops, smartphones, and servers. The latter is especially true when it comes to Enterprise.

Servers running Linux-based operating systems are an integral part of the infrastructure as they are often used as the basis for web, mail, application, database, and file servers. That is why, every year, attackers show more and more interest in these hosts. The number of attacks involving Linux-based systems steadily grows every year. More and more groups, both state-sponsored and financially motivated ones, have Linux-based tools and malware in their arsenals. For example, the notorious Fancy Bear APT was convinced by NSA and FBI in using an advanced Linux rootkit called Drovorub. Another good example is multiple ransomware...