Extracting Credentials from Memory Dump

When to Use

• During incident response to determine what credentials an attacker had access to
• When assessing the scope of credential compromise after a breach
• For identifying accounts that need immediate password resets
• When investigating lateral movement and pass-the-hash/pass-the-ticket attacks
• For recovering encryption keys or authentication tokens from process memory

Prerequisites

• Memory dump in raw, ELF, or crash dump format
• Volatility 3 with Windows symbol tables
• Mimikatz (for offline analysis of extracted LSASS dumps)
• pypykatz (Python implementation of Mimikatz for Linux-based analysis)
• Understanding of Windows authentication (NTLM, Kerberos, DPAPI)
• Appropriate legal authorization for credential extraction

Workflow