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

Preparing for macOS memory acquisition

There are not many macOS memory acquisition tools, and they all support only certain versions of the operating system. Therefore, before choosing and testing the right tool, we need to find out the version of the operating system we plan to work with. To see the macOS version installed, click the Apple menu icon in the top-left corner of your screen, and then select About This Mac:

Figure 10.1 – About This Mac

Figure 10.1 – About This Mac

In the window that appears, you will see the version of the operating system; in our case, it is macOS Big Sur version 11.6. Using the information about the OS version, you can find tools that support memory dumping from this OS.

At the time of writing, the following tools are publicly available:

  • osxpmem – supports 64-bit versions of OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), OS X Mavericks (10.9), OS X Yosemite (10.10), OS X El Capitan (10.11), macOS Sierra (10.11), macOS High Sierra (10.13), macOS...