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

Searching for malicious activity

Searching for malicious activity in macOS basically boils down to the basic elements we dealt with in the previous chapters: looking for suspicious network connections, looking for anomalies in processes, looking for code injection, looking for traces of hooking techniques used, and examining the commands executed in the shell. For example, Shlayer uses the shell to download the payload using the curl utility and -f0L as one of the command-line arguments, and to unpack a protected archive into a directory under /tmp using the unzip command. At the same time, running scripts and commands in the shell can be used in more sophisticated attacks when threat actors have direct access to the host.

To look for code injection, we can use the familiar mac_malfind plugin. However, please note here that running the plugin on memory dumps taken from hosts on the M1 chip may cause execution errors:

Figure 11.18 – Volatility mac_malfind...