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

Exploring popular acquisition tools and techniques

The creation of a memory dump is not a trivial task and depends on several factors. We will discuss all of them individually in this part of the chapter.

Virtual or physical

The environment plays an important role in the process of dump creation. This is due to the fact that no additional tools are required to dump virtual machine memory.

In fact, the contents of the virtual machine's memory are partially or completely placed in a file with a certain extension, so getting a dump is reduced to getting that exact file. The following screenshot shows the basic virtualization tools and files used to store virtual machine memory:

Figure 2.8 – Virtualization tools and files containing memory-related data

An important criterion in obtaining virtual machine memory is its state. It is necessary to understand that if the virtual machine is running, the contents of the memory are constantly changing...