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Part 3 - Memory Forensics and Malware Extraction with Volatility and DumpIt

Considering the threats that have been highlighted in the previous posts, there definitely have to be ways for users to stay or keep themselves safe besides:

  • keeping their antivirus software updated, 
  • first checking whether a program is malicious via Virustotal before installing it or 
  • submitting it to malwr.com which uses the cuckoo sandbox
The operation of cuckoo sandbox was demonstrated in one of the earlier posts on this blog as part of a tool that extracts malware embedded within pictures and scans it.

The video below shows how to use the Volatility framework which is actually a memory forensics tool. It is used in partnership with a "RAM dumping" tool or basically a tool that takes a snapshot of the RAM in a targeted computer. 

For our case, we used DumpIt in the video below. A forensic investigator could have this on a USB drive, connect it to the evidence workstation and then download the RAM dump onto the USB. DumpIt saves the RAM dump in the same location that it (the DumpIt executable) is located.


Volatility is then used to analyse the forensic artifacts in that memory dump. Volatility comes preinstalled on Kali and most forensic Linux VMs such as SIFT Workstation but it can also be cloned from its github repository. It is written in python.

After the analysis is done, the malicious program was extracted using the procdump tag (procexedump in previous versions of Volatility). During the walkthrough, you may realise that some of the commands you're entering are not being recognized by Volatility. In that case, check the possible tags you can use in Volatility by typing Volatility -h.


The field of memory forensics is very deep so we will not delve into the other multiple things Volatility or vol.py can be used for. However, a background in how the operating system you are investigating or trying to rescue is highly necessary. In this case, it is a Windows XP target that was compromised so knowledge of Windows OS operation and libraries is also necessary if you intend to be very effective with this task.



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