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

Searching for malicious processes

We have already learned how to analyze the processes that are active at the time of dumping to identify user activity. Similar techniques can be used when searching for traces left behind by attackers; however, here, our focus will shift to detect specific markers that help identify malicious activity. User programs, such as browsers or MS Office components, will be less a source of information about the user and their recent activities than a potential source of traces of initial access, and processes related to cloud storage will be considered under the lens of a possible data exfiltration technique. The main goal of our investigation is to look for markers of potentially malicious activity and different kinds of anomalies – processes with strange names or unusual arguments, their atypical behavior, and more. However, first things first, let's start with the simplest one – the names of the processes.

Process names

In the...