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

Chapter 10: MacOS Memory Acquisition

The last part of our book is devoted to an important topic – the memory investigation of systems running macOS. In the international desktop operating system market, macOS comes in at a deserved second. Despite the fact that Apple devices were originally considered individual devices for personal use, more and more users adopt them for work purposes every year. Recently, the use of macOS for work has reached a new level, with this operating system beginning to be used enterprise-wide (although this practice is currently more common in the United States). By 2021, Macintosh achieved a 23% share in US enterprises: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3604601/macs-reach-23-share-in-us-enterprises-idc-confirms.html.

With the growing number of macOS users and adoption by enterprises, the interest from threat actors in this operating system has also increased. The number of attacks on macOS has grown significantly in recent years. New tools...