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

Chapter 2: Acquisition Process

Memory acquisition is usually referred to as the process of copying the contents of volatile memory to a non-volatile storage device for preservation. To have a good understanding of the process, the investigator needs to know at least some memory management principles, understand how tools for memory extraction work, and be able to choose the most appropriate tool and use it correctly. In addition, it is important to understand that creating full memory dumps is not always the only solution. There is live memory analysis, which also has its advantages and, in some cases, may be preferable to memory acquisition.

In this chapter, you'll learn about the following:

  • Introducing memory management concepts
  • What's live memory analysis?
  • Understanding partial versus full memory acquisition
  • Exploring popular acquisition tools and techniques