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

Detecting crypto containers

There are several popular encryption tools for Windows:

  • Bitlocker
  • TrueCrypt
  • VeraCrypt

Although the implementation of these tools varies, they all serve the same purpose – to encrypt user data. For some, this may be an opportunity to keep their data private, while for others, it may be an opportunity for them to hide their illegitimate activity. For us, as investigators, it is important to understand that if the encrypted disk was used at the time of dumping, we may find cached volume passwords, master encryption keys, some parts of unencrypted files, or their exact location in memory.

The first step of our investigation here is to identify if there are any encryption tools and what data was encrypted. Sometimes, we will be able to easily identify the tool from the list of running processes, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 4.31 – VeraCrypt process

Unfortunately, Volatility does...