Memory Acquisition using AccessData - FTK
FTK Imager is a data preview and imaging tool used to acquire data(evidence) in a forensically sound manner by creating copies of data without making changes to the original evidence. FTK Imager 4.5 includes faster image creation, additional evidence processing improvements including XFS file system support, improvements to the command line, disk imaging , evidence parsing, and memory dump.
Why Memory Dump?
Volatile memory, or RAM, is used to store data currently used by a running process: whether it is a user application or a system service. This type of memory is much quicker than a regular hard drive, but unlike files permanently stored on a drive(unless deleted), data from RAM may disappear instantly. At the time, it may store data crucial for your case, including passwords in raw format without encryption or encoding, decrypted data otherwise kept encrypted on a drive, decryption keys for various services, apps, and WDE, remote session data; chats in social networks; malware code; cryptocurrency transactions; various system info such as loaded registry branches; and so on.(source: https://belkasoft.com/ram-dumping-tool-selection)
From an incident response perspective, the volatile data residing inside the system’s memory contains rich information such as passwords, credentials, network connections, malware intrusions, registry hives, and etc. that can be a valuable source of evidence and is not typically stored on the local hard disk. This is one of the investigator’s favorite data sources to perform digital forensics on, and knowing the right tool to dump memory is a must.
