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

Analyzing Bash history

The most commonly used shell on Linux systems is Bash, one of the most popular Unix shells. One of the reasons for this popularity is that it is preinstalled on the vast majority of Linux distributions. At the same time, it is quite functional, as it allows you to interactively execute many commands and scripts, work with the filesystem, redirect the input and output of commands, and much more.

Typically, if Bash history logging is enabled, it is stored in the user's home directory, in the .bash_history file. Naturally, attackers may perform various manipulations on both this file and the history-logging process in order to hide their traces. Nevertheless, we can try to recover this information from memory. Volatility has a specific plugin for this, linux_bash. Running this plugin looks like this:

Figure 8.9 – Bash history

As you can see, in our case, the user first tried to output the contents of the passwords file with...