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

Preparing for Windows memory acquisition

Before we start to work with the imaging tools, we need to prepare a couple of things. Firstly, you need to find a flash drive that you will use to store both the tool itself and the created memory dump, so make sure it has enough space. Secondly, you need to sanitize it. This means that you need to forensically wipe the drive.

Important note

During the standard deletion process, metadata related to the deleted files is changed and the space where these files are located is marked as available for reuse. In other words, after deletion, the content of the files will reside on the drive and can be recovered. The formatting process is quite similar. A few certain master files are rewritten, but information can still be obtained from the drive. Thus, to delete files securely, you need to overwrite the content with zeros or random data.

To wipe drives, different tools and methods can be used, depending on the type of removable media. We...