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

Summary

Creating memory dumps of Linux-based systems is a tedious process. You do not have a huge range of tools that do everything you need at the click of a button. However, there are fairly efficient solutions that, when used correctly, will help you get everything you need.

Different tools may use different methods to access memory. The most common method is to load a kernel module; however, this method requires a lot of preparation as the module must be built on a system with a distribution and kernel version similar to the target host. The same conditions are needed to create Volatility profiles, without which further analysis of the dumps would be challenging.

Several scripting solutions can automate the process of creating memory dumps and Volatility profiles, but such solutions will often work with a limited number of distributions, so it is better to test them in conditions similar to the real ones before using them.

In this chapter, we reviewed the tools that allow...