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

Examining network connections

The Volatility netscan plugin is used to analyze network connections. This allows you to collect information about all active and recent connections, as well as open sockets. Let's consider an example:

Figure 5.17 – The Volatility netscan output

In Figure 5.17, we can view the standard netscan output. This gives us information about the OSI transport layer protocol and its version, the IP addresses and ports involved, the PID, and the name of the process that initiated the network activity and when it was created. For the TCP protocols, which, in contrast to UDP, create a connection to transfer data, the status is also specified. For example, if a process is listening on a port and waiting for an incoming connection, the state will be LISTENING. Additionally, if the connection to the remote host is established, it will be ESTABLISHED, and if the connection is already terminated, it will be CLOSED. So, what do we do...