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

Understanding partial versus full memory acquisition

We have determined that working with memory dumps has certain advantages. The only remaining question is what to dump. There are a few tools that allow you to create dumps of specific processes on Windows systems. One such tool is ProcDump, which is a part of Sysinternals Suite.

The following screenshot shows an example of creating a full process dump of the Telegram messenger using ProcDump:

Figure 2.6 – Memory dump of the Telegram process

In Figure 2.6, ProcDump also has an analog for Linux-like systems, which provides a convenient way to create core dumps of Linux applications. Similarly, it is possible to create process dumps on macOS using GDB (GNU Debugger), but it is a more complicated task because it requires direct specification of memory addresses to create dumps.

Dumps of individual processes can be analyzed later using the debugger. The following screenshot shows a dump of the...