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

Investigating Windows Registry

Information about the programs that are frequently run by the user, recently opened documents, outgoing RDP connections, and much more is written in the computer's registry, and we always have the most recent version of it in our memory. To avoid confusion, we need to understand how the registry works in Windows.

Virtual registry

To work properly, your computer needs to store information about hardware and software configurations, data about all the system users, information about each user's settings, and much, much more. When our system starts up, it collects this information from the hardware and registry files stored in non-volatile memory and creates a virtual registry in memory. This virtual registry is where the current configurations are stored, and where all the changes that will be transferred to the files and written to disk will be stored in the first place. The process of interacting with the registry is ongoing, so we can...