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

Searching for opened documents

Unfortunately, Linux-based systems do not have the same level of information logging as Windows. Nevertheless, it is still possible to find information about a particular file or even try to recover its content from memory. But first things first.

You already know that the files opened at the start of a program can be seen with the linux_psaux or linux_bash plugins. If you are interested in the files opened while a program is running, you can use the linux_lsof plugin by passing it the ID of the process you are interested in via the -p option. Let's try to find information about xls files opened by the soffice.bin process of the itupport user. To search for files of a certain type, we will use grep:

Figure 8.11 – Files opened in LibreOffice

The output shows that, in our case, LibreOffice connected to only one file, cliens.xls. It would be nice to know the contents of this file as well. Volatility provides a mechanism...