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 3: Windows Memory Acquisition

You already know some theory, but as you may know, in essence, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in reality there is. So, let's move on and dive into some practical tasks, starting with Windows memory acquisition, as Windows is the most widely used operating system.

What does it mean? It's the most common target for threat actors! It also means that you will face it very often during your incident response engagements (and some criminal cases, of course). Therefore it's a very good idea to start from learning how to acquire memory from a Windows host.

This chapter will introduce you to the four most common tools used for Windows memory acquisition, and—of course—you'll learn how to use them and obtain memory images for further analysis.

We'll cover the following topics:

  • Understanding Windows memory-acquisition issues
  • Preparing for Windows memory acquisition
  • ...