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

Investigating network connections

Network activity analysis helps us determine which processes are establishing network connections, as well as which IP addresses and ports are being used. Since most malware and post-exploitation tools establish network connections, investigating network activity is one of our top priorities. In the case of macOS, Volatility offers a number of plugins to examine network interfaces, active network connections, and the contents of routing tables.

We can use the mac_ifconfig plugin to get information about the configuration of the network interfaces of the host under investigation:

Figure 11.1 – Volatility mac_ifconfig output

As you can see in the figure, this plugin provides information about the names of interfaces, their assigned IP and MAC addresses, as well as the set promiscuous mode.

Important Note

Promiscuous mode is a mode for a network interface controller that forces the controller to pass all the...