Reliable Memory Acquisition for Windows, Linux, macOS
by AAron Walters
As members of the Volatility mailing list, you know that memory
acquisition has proven to be one of the most important and precarious
aspects of digital investigations. Over the years, you have seen the
Volatility team spend a lot of time troubleshooting issues that were
ultimately caused by failed or corrupted acquisition attempts. You have
also seen our colleague, George M. Garner, lead spirited debates about the
reliability of proposed acquisition tools and techniques. With George’s
untimely passing last summer, the industry not only lost one of the most
robust Window’s acquisition tools, but it also lost an industry thought
leader who held the forensics community to a higher standard.
Unfortunately, many investigators still blindly trust free and commercial
acquisition tools without understanding the associated risks and
limitations. While these tools may be readily accessible, many are
unsupported or have been effectively abandoned by their original
developers who have moved on to pursue other projects. As an example,
Google’s GRR project recently disabled their memory forensics capabilities
because it was introducing instabilities, and it wasn’t being actively
maintained. A recent empirical study also showed that most open source or
commercial Windows memory acquisition tools either failed to collect or
crashed systems with modern security features enabled. We can also share
countless stories of investigators and law enforcement officers returning
to their labs only to discover that their memory acquisitions had failed.
There is a growing need for a reliable and actively supported memory
acquisition capability across Windows, Linux, and macOS.
If you follow us on twitter (@volatility) or have taken our training
classes within the last couple of years, you have heard about Volexity’s
Surge Collect. Surge Collect provides a reliable and commercially
supported collection capability with flexible storage options. Surge
Collect can also be easily integrated with Tanium, Carbon Black, and other
enterprise software agents. It is currently in use by many of the largest
federal and local law enforcement agencies around the world. Surge
Collect is also actively used by leading incident response firms,
technology companies, telecommunication providers, universities, Fortune
companies, and branches of the military.
If you are looking for a commercially supported acquisition solution with
dedicated development and support teams for Windows, Linux, and macOS, I
recommend you check out Volexity’s Surge Collect. Hopefully, this will
FINALLY give investigators a reliable and flexible acquisition capability
they can depend on and allow the Volatility team to focus more of our time
on developing exciting new memory analysis capabilities!
Thanks,
AAron Walters
Original author of Volatility
Founder of The Volatility Foundation
6 years, 11 months
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Malware and Memory Forensics Training Headed to Amsterdam
by Andrew Case
The next stop for our training course is Amsterdam in September. This will be our only public offering in Europe in 2018.
Historically our courses have sold out around a month in advance, so please contact us ASAP if you wish to attend.
For our US-based students, we will be back in Herndon in October.
Full information on both offerings can be found here:
https://volatility-labs.blogspot.com/2018/02/malware-and-memory-forensics-t…
We look forward to meeting many new Volatility users at these events!
6 years, 12 months
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