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

Summary

When creating memory images, you must consider not only the general concept but also factors unique to each individual operating system. For the Windows operating system, such a factor is access to the /Devices/PhysicalMemory kernel object.

Most modern tools use kernel drivers to create dumps, but some tools have their own unique approach, manifested by using alternatives to the classic /Devices/PhysicalMemory mapping.

Despite the variety of tools for Windows memory extraction, it is worth remembering that the best tool is the one that has been successfully tested on systems identical—or at least, very similar—to the target.

In this chapter, we have learned how to create memory dumps using various free tools. Now, it's time to start looking inside them! In the next chapter, we will get to know the tools for Windows memory-dump analysis and learn how to search for traces of user activity.