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

Analyzing launched applications

Applications analysis may help an investigator to build the suspect's profile. The analysis of running processes may help us to understand whether the suspect is using some messengers or web browsers with high anonymity levels or if any encrypted containers are currently mounted. Such data sources may be full of valuable forensic artifacts and, what's more, be unavailable during post-mortem analysis.

Each time the user starts a program, the corresponding process is created in memory and added to the list of active processes. By analyzing this list, we can get information about the programs running at the moment the dump is taken. That's what we'll do once we get to know our analysis tools.

Introducing Volatility

The Volatility framework is the most popular free tool for memory dump analysis. Many vendors have included support for this tool in their solutions, including Autopsy and Magnet AXIOM. The source code for this tool...