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