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

Looking for mounted devices

On Linux operating systems, users have the ability to mount devices as well as specific filesystems. Analysis of such information can help us identify not only the individual devices and filesystems mounted to the host but also recover the relative timelines of their mounts.

The Volatility linux_mount plugin can be used to find information about attached devices and filesystems:

Figure 8.33 – Mounted filesystems

As you can see from the screenshot, this plugin displays information about all mounted devices and filesystems, including their location, mount point, type, and access rights. The attentive reader may have already noticed that we also talked about the timeline, but this information is missing here. So, what can we do?

In this case, the kernel debug buffer will help us. The kernel debug buffer contains information about the connected USB devices and their serial numbers, network activity in promiscuous mode, and...