Summary

Memory is a great source of forensic artifacts in the hands of an experienced investigator. Memory analysis provides information on malware activity and its functionality, user context, including recent actions, browsing activity, messaging, and unique evidence such as fileless malware, memory-only application data, encryption keys, and so on.

Memory analysis, like anything else, must be approached in some way. One of the most important things is to set the investigation goal and break it down into simple components to conduct the investigation more quickly and efficiently, and, what's more important, to decide whether it's necessary or data left on the disk is enough to get the answers.

Of course, there is no silver bullet, and memory forensics also has its drawbacks. The main problem is data preservation, but if you can manage that, you will be generously rewarded.

So now that you've learned about the benefits of memory forensics and the challenges associated with it, and you understand the approach to investigation, what's next? We think it's time to dive into the more practical stuff, and our first stop is the memory acquisition process, which we'll talk about in the next chapter.