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

The techniques used to detect and analyze malicious activity on Linux-based systems are similar to those used on Windows operating systems. We concentrate on the investigation of active network connections and various anomalies in the processes and their behavior. However, analysis of such activity often comes down to examining network traffic dumps, which can also be extracted from memory; investigating the memory of individual processes; or examining the filesystem in memory. In most cases, it is these three elements that allow us to find the necessary evidence and reconstruct the actions of the threat actors.

Undoubtedly, knowledge of the filesystem structure, the location, and the contents of the major files play an important role in the investigation of Linux-based systems. Thus, knowing what software is being used on the system under investigation, and knowing where its logs and configuration files are stored, will allow you to easily find the information you need...