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

Chapter 4: Reconstructing User Activity with Windows Memory Forensics

User activity reconstruction is essential for many use cases since it gives us a better understanding of what is going on. In the first chapter, we discussed that if you receive a device participating in the incident, the victim or suspect probably owned this device. If we analyze the victim's device, user activity can tell us how the infection occurred or how the attacker acted while remotely accessing the computer. If we are talking about the attacker's device, such analysis allows us to understand how the preparation for the attack took place, what actions the threat actor performed, and how to find evidence of illegitimate activity. Also, if you are dealing with criminal cases that are not related to hacking but more traditional crimes, such as child pornography, human trafficking, and drug dealing, memory images may contain key sources of evidence. Here, you may be able to recover private communications...