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 Magnet RAM Capture

Magnet Forensics also released its own free memory acquisition tool, called Magnet RAM Capture, which can be used to acquire memory from Windows systems. To extract the physical memory, Magnet RAM Capture uses a kernel-mode driver. It creates memory dumps in raw format, which is supported by both open source memory forensic tools and full-featured digital forensic suites.

To download Magnet RAM Capture, take the following steps:

  1. Go to the RESOURCES tab and then the FREE TOOLS tab on the official Magnet Forensics web page at https://www.magnetforensics.com/.
  2. Choose MAGNET RAM CAPTURE and fill in a short form. After confirmation, you will receive a download link. After downloading, copy MRCv120.exe to your flash drive.

Dumping memory with Magnet RAM Capture is very easy and straightforward, as the following instructions show:

  1. Connect the flash drive to the target system and run MRCv120.exe as Administrator.
  2. ...