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

Examining communication applications

How often do you use communication apps to chat, send videos, or look at pictures of cute cats that have been sent to you? The answer is probably every day. Email and messengers have become an essential part of our lives, so we cannot avoid them. While examining the dump that's been taken from the victim's computer, we might come across a malicious document sent by email, and in the memory dump of the suspect's computer, we might find correspondence with accomplices.

We have already talked about email, so we'll start there.

Email, email, email

Nowadays, there are many different email agents, and some people prefer to use a browser to check their mail. Thus, we can reduce the analysis to the following:

  • If, in the list of running processes, we see a process related to the email agent, we can check the resources being used by the handles plugin and look for files that might be in the attachment.
  • Also, if there...