It’s October, haunting season. However, in the forensics world, the hunting of evil never ends. And with Windows 10 expected to be the new normal, digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) professionals who lack the necessary (memory) hunting skills will pay the price.
Investigators who do not look at volatile memory are leaving evidence at the crime scene. RAM content holds evidence of user actions, as well as evil processes and furtive behaviors implemented by malicious code. It is this evidence that often proves to be the smoking gun that unravels the story of what happened on a system.
Although Microsoft is not expected to reach its Windows 10 rollout goal of one billion devices in the next two years, their glossiest OS to date currently makes up 22% of desktop systems according to netmarketshare.com.