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 8: User Activity Reconstruction

During forensic investigations and incident responses, reconstructing user activity is an essential part of collecting important data from the hosts of both victims and attackers. Linux-based systems have an important role to play here as they are often used by attackers to carry out their activities. This is because many different network and vulnerability scanners, web application security testing tools, and post-exploitation frameworks are implemented under Linux. Thus, investigating the host used by the attackers reveals to us detailed information about the tools and techniques used in the attack. Furthermore, by examining user activity, we can learn more about the stages of preparation for the attack, possible affiliates, activity on different forums, and more.

Based on the preceding lines, we must consider the following topics:

  • Investigating launched programs
  • Analyzing Bash history
  • Searching for recent files
  • Recovering...