Memory Acquisition and Analysis - RAM Information

-
Why is memory acquisition and analysis important? What types of information can be acquired from RAM that may not be available on a hard drive? 


Memory acquisition and analysis is important because it includes the memory that was stored before the system crash that provides experts with diagnostic information at the time of the crash and contains a code that caused the crash. 

Through the practice of memory forensics, experts are supplied with run-time system activity, such as open network connections or recently executed commands &processes. Before programs are executed on the computer, they are loaded into the memory making the use of memory forensics of high importance. Each program or data which is created, examined, or deleted is stored in the RAM. 

 The information that can be acquired from RAM includes images, all web-browsing activity, encryption keys, network connections, or injected code fragments. 

According to ("The Importance of Memory Forensics", 2017) Attackers can develop malware which only resides in the memory, rather than the disk, making it virtually invisible to standard computer forensic methods. This makes the need of memory forensics tools in high demand. The importance of memory forensics cannot be stressed enough, especially when collecting evidence in an attack and finding the attacker. The examination of volatile data found only in the RAM; offers insight to experts they would otherwise not have.
 
References: 

The Importance of Memory Forensics. (2017). Retrieved 20 May 2020, from https://lifars.com/2017/06/memory-forensics-tools/ 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chain of Custody - OJ Simpson case

-
Image
Research the OJ Simpson trial. How do you think chain of custody was handled? What should have been done differently? There was a lot of doubts due to the amount of evidence that was collected but not actually recorded using the chain of custody. This resulted in theories being created which claimed that the police and scenes of crime officers were actually planting evidence, an example of evidence that was collected but not recorded in the chain of custody would be the drops of blood that were found at the crime scene which scenes of crimes officers thought was OJ Simpsons, it was later found that test tube filled with blood was not sent straight to the lab for inspection, it was left at the police station for many hours before actually making its way to the lab to be analyzed which further increased suspicion that evidence was being tampered with.  Everything from the crime scene should have been documented and added over to the right personnel in charge and for the time sensitiv...
Read more

File Carving or Data Carving

-
Image
What does the term "data carving" or "file carving" really mean? What are the implications of carving with a large distance (in bytes) between the header and footer? Is it feasible for a malware author to create their own file format, hide the file on a system, and use carving to extract it?   File carving is the process of reassembling computer files from fragments in the absence of file-system metadata.  File carving is a well-known computer forensics term used to describe the identification and extraction of file types from unallocated clusters using file signatures. A file signature, also commonly referred to as a magic number, is a constant numerical or text value used to identify a file format   ("Data Carving", 2018) .   Since File carving   is usually done by examining the header (the first few bytes) and footer (the last few bytes) of a file, larger distance between the footer and header will affect the amount of data recovered during  the process...
Read more

Legal Issues with Social Networking

-
Image
  Exploring the privacy legal issues associated with online social networking sites. According to data collected by Hootesuite, 45% of the world 's population is using social networks. That means a whopping 3.48 billion people are linked to any social Network. The Wiki Article states that Privacy issues with social networking sites are a subset of data privacy that includes the right to require personal privacy regarding storage, re-use, third-party provision and display of self-relevant information through the Internet. These social platforms use Apps that allow users to participate are tweets, invites, videos, open platform applications and other applications that are also the platforms for others to access private information about a user. Privacy Issues include cyber-stalking, location disclosure, social profiling, 3rd party personal information disclosure, and government use of social network websites in investigations without the safeguard of a search warrant. The above is al...
Read more