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

Understanding Linux memory acquisition issues

In Chapter 2, Acquisition Process, we discussed general memory dumping issues, which are also relevant in the case of Linux-based systems. However, the process of creating Linux memory dumps also has unique problems that are specific to these systems. These are the problems we will focus on.

The main difficulty that's encountered by professionals when dumping memory is the number of distributions. Since the Linux kernel is open source and distributed under the GNU General Public License, it quickly gained popularity among the community and became the basis for many distributions, each of which has its own features. Naturally, this had an impact on the memory extraction process.

Earlier versions of the kernel, before Linux 2.6, allowed access to memory via /dev/mem and /dev/kmem devices. The /dev/mem interface provided programs with root access to physical memory for read and write operations, while /dev/kmem allowed access to...