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

Summary

User activity analysis plays an important role regardless of the operating system under investigation, as it can reconstruct the context in which the incident occurred and reveal important details about the actions taken by the user. On the other hand, Linux operating systems are often used by attackers, so investigating user activity on such systems takes on a special meaning.

Due to the way Linux systems are designed, investigating them is not as easy as it is with Windows. Nevertheless, we can obtain data about running programs, documents opened, devices connected, crypto containers used, and so on.

An important aid in analyzing user activity on Linux is the examination of process memory, which is done in several steps. Despite the relative difficulty of extracting mappings and their further processing, the process memory may contain valuable data – visited links, conversations, publications, email addresses, filenames, and so on.

Thus, we have covered the...