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

Analyzing processes and process memory

Processes can be analyzed both to look for anomalies and identify potentially malicious processes, and to observe user activity. As before, Volatility provides a number of plugins for obtaining data about processes and their memory. For example, the mac_pslist, mac_pstree, and mac_tasks plugins can be used to get a list of processes. From a practical point of view, mac_tasks is considered the most reliable source of information on active processes. This plugin, unlike mac_pslist, enumerates tasks and searches for the process objects instead of relying on a linked list of processes, which can be corrupted during macOS memory acquisition. Nevertheless, during testing on the latest versions of the operating system, the mac_pstree plugin turns out to be the most efficient, correctly displaying results for macOS on both Intel and M1 chips.

The plugins are launched in the same way as for Windows and Linux:

Figure 11.6 –...