Conducting Memory Forensics with Volatility
When to Use
- An endpoint has been contained during an active incident and volatile evidence must be preserved
- EDR alerts suggest process injection or fileless malware that only exists in memory
- Encryption keys need to be recovered from a ransomware-infected system before shutdown
- Credential theft (Mimikatz, LSASS dumping) is suspected and evidence must be confirmed
- A rootkit or kernel-level compromise is suspected and disk-based analysis is insufficient
Do not use for analyzing disk images or file system artifacts; use disk forensics tools (Autopsy, FTK) for those tasks.
Prerequisites
- Memory acquisition tool deployed or available: WinPmem, Magnet RAM Capture, DumpIt, or AVML (Linux)
- Volatility 3 installed with Python 3.8+ and required symbol tables
- Sufficient storage for memory dumps (equal to system RAM size, typically 8-64 GB)
- YARA rules for malware detection in memory (Florian Roth's signature-base, custom rules)
- Reference baseline of normal processes and DLLs for the OS version being analyzed
- Chain of custody documentation for evidence handling
Workflow
Step 1: Acquire Memory Image
Captu…
