Practical Memory Forensics

Chapter 6: Alternative Sources of Volatile Memory

In previous chapters, we have talked about the importance of memory dumps as a source of useful data for forensic investigations. We've looked at many different tools for analysis, discussed techniques for user activity examination, and discussed techniques for detecting traces of malicious software. However, the subject of Windows operating system memory forensics is not over yet.

We mentioned at the very beginning that there are alternative sources of memory that might contain similar information in addition to the main memory itself. If for some reason you were unable to create a full memory dump or its analysis failed, you can always turn to these sources: hibernation file, pagefile, swapfile, ...