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

Checking browsing history

On Linux-based systems, as on Windows, most popular browsers store their data in SQLite databases. For example, Firefox stores its history in the places.sqlite file located in /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/*.default-release, and Chrome stores its history in the history file from /home/user/.config/google-chrome/Default. If you've managed to retrieve these files from memory during the filesystem recovery process, that's fine. But of course, this will not always be the case. If you do not have the standard history files at your disposal, you will have to search for information about the visited resources in process memory. In some ways, this approach is even more versatile in that it allows you to obtain data on the visited websites regardless of the browser and history storage formats that are used.

The process of accessing an individual process's memory will not be as straightforward as it is in Windows. To give you an example, let's take...