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

Compared to the OSes discussed earlier, macOS is the most difficult to work with. Most of the tools that support creating memory dumps on newer versions of macOS are paid, and the freeware tools support dumping only for macOS versions up to Catalina.

A further difficulty is launching the tools themselves. Due to macOS security features, it is necessary to change a number of settings in order to run programs from third-party sources. This is especially true for tools that use kext loading.

Another difficulty is the creation of Volatility profiles for newer versions of macOS. This is due to the fact that creating a profile requires converting a dwarf file into a format recognized by Volatility, and the scripts provided by Volatility developers and found in the official GitHub repository do not work with the latest versions of macOS.

Given all the difficulties that can be encountered when creating a macOS memory dump in a form suitable for analysis, before starting...