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 pagefiles and swapfiles

We have already mentioned pagefiles and swapfiles in previous chapters. There, we talked about the mechanism used by our operating system to keep a large number of processes running at the same time. This mechanism operates by putting temporary process data into a specially reserved space on disk—the pagefile—when physical memory shortages occur.

Important Note

Data is loaded into a pagefile page by page, in blocks of 4 kilobytes (KB), so the data can occupy a continuous area as well as different parts of the pagefile. Consequently, you can use both file carving and string searching during analysis. Additionally, Windows keeps track of pagefile entries and their relation to a particular process only in memory at runtime, so it is not possible to recover this relationship during pagefile analysis.

The main difference between swapfiles and pagefiles is that a swapfile stores data from Microsoft Store applications (previously known...