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

What's live memory analysis?

There are several situations where it is impossible to create a memory dump. We already discussed these situations in Chapter 1, Why Memory Forensics?. Also, memory extraction may become inefficient for remote systems or systems with more than 32 GB of RAM. In such cases, you can use live memory analysis for manual examination of running processes, their memory contents, network connections, and the current system state.

Important Note

Keep in mind that you will often need a user with administrator rights to perform live analysis. If a threat actor has access to the target system and uses credential carving tools, then logging in as a privileged user simply gives away your credentials.

Windows

To perform live memory analysis on Windows hosts, there is a wide list of various tools, from built-in to advanced forensic frameworks. Also, many EDR/XDR solutions nowadays allow incident responders to perform live memory analysis.

Let's...