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

Analyzing command-line arguments

Analyzing command-line arguments is very important because it allows you to check the location from which the executable was run and the arguments passed to it. These arguments can include IP addresses or hostnames of other compromised hosts, stolen credentials, malicious filenames, and entire scripts, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 5.8 – The command-line arguments used by the Emotet operators

Let's explore a few ways to get the data of interest.

Command line arguments of the processes

First of all, we can use the pstree plugin that we are already familiar with and add the -v option to it. This will allow us to output the process tree together with detailed information about the command line used to start a particular program. This is how the output, as shown in Figure 5.7, will change with the addition of the -v option:

Figure 5.9 – The verbose pstree output

As...