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 Windows memory-acquisition issues

In the previous chapter, we covered the general concepts of memory dumping in detail and discussed possible issues. However, each operating system has its particular peculiarities. The main peculiarity related to memory extraction in Windows is the access to random-access memory (RAM), but first things first.

Remember that earlier, we talked about device memory, which is the area of physical memory that is reserved for devices? Such devices include video cards, audio cards, Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) cards, and so on. Their direct access to the physical memory is vital for their qualitative and effective operation. And do you remember what trying to access device memory can lead to? That's right—it can lead to unpredictable consequences.

The thing is, attempts to access or write to device memory are translated into requests sent to the corresponding device. However, different devices may react differently...