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

Understanding macOS memory acquisition issues

In the previous chapters, we discussed hardware and software methods of memory extraction. In the case of OS X and macOS, these methods will also be relevant, but there are a couple of extremely important things to consider. Let's start with the hardware-based solutions.

Recall that hardware-based acquisition tools rely on direct memory access and use technology such as FireWire or Thunderbolt. For now, almost every Macintosh offers a FireWire or Thunderbolt port, and acquiring memory content in this case does not require an administrator's password and unlocked computer. However, it obviously cannot be that simple. First, this technology only permits the acquisition of the first 4 GB of RAM, which will not be enough to thoroughly examine systems having more than 4 GB of RAM. Second, since 2013, Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-d) for directed input/output was enabled. This technology works as a remapper and effectively...