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

Acquiring memory with WinPmem

WinPmem was originally developed by Google and was a part of the Rekall Framework, but has now been released as a standalone memory acquisition tool. The tool supports a wide range of Windows versions—from XP to 10—and has standalone executables both for 32- and 64-bit systems.

WinPmem utilizes three independent methods to create memory dumps, outlined as follows:

  • Page table entry (PTE) remapping
  • Use of the MMMapIoSpace kernel application programming interface (API)
  • Traditional \Device\PhysicalMemory mapping

The first of the preceding methods is used by default as it is considered the most stable. However, users can choose any other method manually.

To download this tool, go to the WinPmem repository on the Velocidex GitHub page, at https://github.com/Velocidex/WinPmem.

The page looks like this:

Figure 3.5 – WinPmem GitHub repository

On the right side of the page, go to Releases...