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

Creating timelines

Timelines are extremely useful. They can play an important role in your investigation because not only can you find out details about what happened to the target system during a certain period of time, but you can also reconstruct the actions of the attackers step by step. Here are a few approaches of how to use timelines:

  • Analysis of system changes during the incident: If you already have data regarding the time of the incident, you can use the timeline to analyze the changes that occurred in the target system during this period.
  • Analysis of the file's timestamps: Using the filesystem-based timeline, you can search for entries that correspond to specific files and analyze timestamps of their appearance or the actions performed on them.
  • Search for malicious program execution: In the memory-based timeline, you will be able to observe the creation of processes corresponding to various programs, including malware, and in the filesystem-based timeline...