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

Recovering user passwords

Instant messengers are not the only location where we can search for passwords. We can find them in a cache, in the memory of text editors, buffers, command lines, or even some specific system processes. Volatility has several plugins to collect information about credentials:

  • hashdump
  • lsadump
  • cachedump

Let's check them out, one by one.

Hashdump

The hashdump plugin can be used to dump hashes of local user passwords on Windows systems before Windows 8. The command will look like this:

Figure 4.26 – Volatility hashdump

In the output, you can see the account name, followed by the relative identifier and the LM and NT hashes. Notice that we have the same hashes for Administrator and Guest users. These specific hashes indicate blank passwords.

Another way to dump credentials is to use the cachedump plugin.

Cachedump

This plugin can be used to dump hashes of cached domain user passwords. By...