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

Analyzing crash dumps

When a system gets into an unstable state—for example, due to an exception that cannot be handled correctly—a Windows crash occurs. This happens because of bugs in kernel drivers or other code running at the kernel level. In this case, Windows attempts to save information that is relevant to the crash and can be used for debugging purposes. Since the system is in an unstable state during the crash, the data is first written to the paging file and then transferred to the appropriate dump file during the next boot. Depending on the system configuration, different crash dumps can be created. The following screenshot shows the dump formats offered by Windows 10:

Figure 6.31 – Crash dump formats in Windows 10

Let's take a closer look at these formats, as follows:

  • Small memory dump: These files have a size of 64 KB and 128 KB in 32-bit systems and 64-bit systems respectively. They contain information about running...