Analyzing launched applications
Applications analysis may help an investigator to build the suspect's profile. The analysis of running processes may help us to understand whether the suspect is using some messengers or web browsers with high anonymity levels or if any encrypted containers are currently mounted. Such data sources may be full of valuable forensic artifacts and, what's more, be unavailable during post-mortem analysis.
Each time the user starts a program, the corresponding process is created in memory and added to the list of active processes. By analyzing this list, we can get information about the programs running at the moment the dump is taken. That's what we'll do once we get to know our analysis tools.
Introducing Volatility
The Volatility framework is the most popular free tool for memory dump analysis. Many vendors have included support for this tool in their solutions, including Autopsy and Magnet AXIOM. The source code for this tool...
