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 injections in process memory

There are different types of injections within process memory. Some are similar to each other, while others differ considerably. Depending on the technique used, the methods for detecting injections might vary. We will attempt to discuss the most relevant types of injections and the methods for their detection.

Dynamic-link library injections

Adversaries can use this technique for defense evasion or privilege escalation tactics. In general, the injection of Dynamic link Libraries (DLLs) is one of the methods used to execute arbitrary code in the address space of a legitimate process. There are two main types of DLL injections: remote and reflective.

Remote DLL injections

The malicious process gets SeDebugPrivilege, which allows it to act as a debugger and gain read and write access to the address space of other processes. Using these privileges, the malicious process opens a handle for the target process, accesses its address space...