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

Creating a Volatility profile

To analyze Linux memory dumps, you need to create a Volatility profile that corresponds to the target host configurations. Let's consider this with an example. First, you need to install the zip and dwarfdump packages, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 7.7 – dwarfdump and zip installation

Next, we need to download Volatility. To do this, we will use the git clone command, which allows us to clone repositories from GitHub. If you do not have git, it must be installed using apt:

$ sudo apt-get install git
$ git clone https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility.git

After that, you should go to the volatility/tools/linux directory and run the make command:

$ cd volatility/tools/linux
$ make

The listed actions will look as follows:

Figure 7.8 – Creating the dwarf module

As a result, you will get a module.dwarf file.

Important Note

Depending on the distribution...