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

Acquiring memory with AVML

AVML, or Acquire Volatile Memory for Linux, is a userland acquisition tool developed by Microsoft. The main advantage of AVML is that it does not need to be built on the target host and supports multiple sources:

  • /dev/crash
  • /proc/kcore
  • /dev/mem

If no particular source is specified when you run AVML, the tool will go through all the sources, looking for a valid one and collecting memory from it.

The disadvantage, perhaps, is that this tool has been tested on a limited number of distributions, so it is better to check it into a virtual environment before using it.

At the time of writing this book, the following distributions have been tested:

  • Ubuntu: 12.04, 14.04, 16.04, 18.04, 18.10, 19.04, 19.10
  • Centos: 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 6.10, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6
  • RHEL: 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 8
  • Debian: 8, 9
  • Oracle Linux: 6.8, 6.9, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6

So, the first thing you need...