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

Recovering the filesystem

In addition to retrieving individual files, Volatility provides the ability to recover a portion of the filesystem that was in memory at the time the dump was created. This is made possible precisely because of the large number of metadata stored in the inode. Filesystem recovery can be done using the linux_recover_filesystem plugin:

$ vol.py --plugins=profiles -f /mnt/hgfs/flash/ubuntu_11.05.58.lime 
--profile=Linuxubuntu_18_04_5_4_0-84-genericx64 linux_recover_filesystem -D /mnt/hgfs/flash/recover_fs/

Note that here we add the -D option, specifying the directory where we want to save the filesystem to be recovered. In our case, it will be saved in the recover_fs folder. The result of the plugin will look like this:

Figure 8.14 – Recovered FS

Here, you can see the standard directories that have been recovered and also a swapfile, which is the Linux equivalent of Windows' pagefile. You can analyze this file in a...