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

Chapter 6: Alternative Sources of Volatile Memory

In previous chapters, we have talked about the importance of memory dumps as a source of useful data for forensic investigations. We've looked at many different tools for analysis, discussed techniques for user activity examination, and discussed techniques for detecting traces of malicious software. However, the subject of Windows operating system memory forensics is not over yet.

We mentioned at the very beginning that there are alternative sources of memory that might contain similar information in addition to the main memory itself. If for some reason you were unable to create a full memory dump or its analysis failed, you can always turn to these sources: hibernation file, pagefile, swapfile, and crash dumps. This is what we will talk about in this chapter.

The chapter will explain how to access alternative sources of volatile data, which tools to use to analyze it, and, of course, which techniques to use to retrieve...