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 network activity

Since most malware needs to communicate with a command-and-control server, download additional modules, or send some data, the appearance of network connections is unavoidable. However, before going on to investigate network connections, it would be a good idea to find out which network interfaces were used on our host and how they were configured. To do this, we can use the Volatility linux_ifconfig plugin, which provides all the necessary information in the following way:

Figure 9.1 – Information about network interfaces

In the output, we can see that there are three interfaces used on the investigated host:

  • lo – A loopback interface with the standard 127.0.0.1 IP address
  • ens33 – A network interface with the 192.168.168.144 IP address
  • ens38 – A network interface with the 192.168.3.133 IP address

We can now start investigating active network connections. For this purpose, Volatility...