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

Analyzing malicious activity

Let's take a closer look at the last example. We saw that we had several SSH connections. We can analyze the processes that might be related to that. To do that, let's use the linux_pstree plugin and add sshd process identifiers – 29897 and 23251:

Figure 9.12 – Volatility linux_pstree

In Figure 9.12, we can see that the child processes of sshd are bash as well as sudo, which means that elevated privileges were used. In this case, we can search the bash history as well as dump and analyze the memory of these processes.

We start with the bash history. For this, we will use the linux_bash plugin:

Figure 9.13 – Bash history

Here, we can see that someone was working with MySQL and WordPress, and we can see the interaction with the site-info.php file, as well as the nyan-cat.gif download associated with the bash process with the 30112 PID.

We can check which user ran bash...