Memory Analysis using Volatility - connections

Volatility is a tool used for extraction of digital artifacts from volatile memory(RAM) samples. Volatility uses a set of plugins that can be used to extract these artifacts in a time efficient and quick manner.

connections a volatility plugin that is used to scan connections on Windows XP and Windows 2003 only.

Connection State:

      • CLOSE_WAIT
      • CLOSED
      • ESTABLISHED
      • FIN_WAIT_1
      • FIN_WAIT_2
      • LAST_ACK
      • LISTEN
      • SYN_RECEIVED
      • SYN_SEND
      • TIMED_WAIT

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.

 

When capturing a memory dump from Windows XP, you cannot use netscan as a plugin. Instead, we will use the Volatility connection plugin to extract network related data from inside our volatile memory.

Our syntax will be like: vol.exe -f <mem_dump> –profile=<OS_version> connections