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

Summary

Analyzing Windows memory dumps is a time-consuming process but can yield invaluable results. In addition to examining full dumps, you should not forget about alternative sources, which can also be of great help in forensic investigations and incident response.

Alternative sources include hibernation files, page files, and swap files, as well as crash dumps and process memory dumps. Some of these files, such as a pagefile and a swapfile, are enabled by default and are created automatically while the operating system is running. Others are created when the system goes into a specific state—for example, a hibernation file is created when the system enters the appropriate mode. The latter, crash dumps, are created when a system crash or application crash occurs, but you can also trigger these states artificially. Among other things, there are special tools that allow you to create individual process dumps, such as process memory dumps, without directly affecting their...