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

Detecting crypto containers

An important step in the investigation of user activity on Linux systems is to look for crypto containers, especially when it comes to investigating hosts used by potential threat actors. The fact is that, for their own safety, they can put important data related to the preparation for an attack, developed malicious tools, or stolen information into the crypto containers.

Linux-based systems have various encryption options ranging from dm-Crypt to the more standard TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt. In fact, the process of detecting crypto containers and recovering encryption keys is almost the same as in Windows. Therefore, we will only discuss the main points.

Firstly, you can still use analysis of running processes to detect encryption containers because if a crypto container was opened on the system, you will still find the corresponding process in the list.

Second, for the most popular TrueCrypt solution, Volatility has a separate plugin to recover...