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

Investigating communication applications

In addition to various browsers, Linux-based desktop operating systems also support a large number of communication applications – messengers, mail agents, chat rooms, and so on. Naturally, the information these applications carry may be of interest to us, especially if they are hosted by an attacker.

As we mentioned before, analysis of such applications will not differ much from analysis of browsers, as we will be working with process memory. Let's take a look at an example. We have already seen that we have a Thunderbird application with the 51825 ID on the target host. Let's dump its memory, as we did before with Firefox:

Figure 8.30 – Thunderbird memory

We can now use the preceding script to get all the readable lines from the dumped files:

$ for file in /mnt/hgfs/flash/thunderbird/*; do strings "$file" >> /mnt/hgfs/flash/thunderbird_strings.txt; done

Once executed...