SANS revamps its Memory Analysis Course

To provide digital forensic and incident response professionals with a more exact and efficient way to investigate advanced attacks, SANS Institute today announced a complete revamp of its SANS FOR526: Memory Analysis In-Depth course.

The significantly modified course places greater emphasis on the practitioner, arming analysts with cutting-edge memory analysis techniques that will have a better chance of detecting and stopping a breach, guarding against data theft and PII disclosure.

Adding memory forensics techniques to the IR team’s repertoire delivers greater ROI than any other investigative technique. Often, forensics technicians have discovered actionable results from memory forensics before the disk image is even complete.

This week-long course provides students with the most effective and immediately useful skillset for incident responders and forensics examiners alike. The skills they will learn are changing the very response processes their security teams are using in the trenches. As a key element of the SANS Digital Forensics and Incident Response Curriculum, the Memory Analysis course delivers the most critical skills for triaging and responding to a potential compromise. This cutting-edge course covers everything you need to implement memory analysis like a pro.

“Whether capturing system memory, extracting a hibernation file or tearing apart a crash dump, a forensic examiner has multiple ways to see active processes as they were running on a system,” said Alissa Torres, SANS Instructor and course author of FOR526. “In investigations from malware infections to acceptable use policy violations, catching suspicious binaries in action is central to the most challenging cases in forensics today. Memory Forensics gives examiners access to this evidence and often provides the initial thread that, when followed, unravels the story of the entire investigation.”

“Insider threats have become increasingly more advanced, yet they continue to be ignored as the focus remains primarily on external threats,” said Jake Williams, SANS Instructor. “Fortunately for investigators, monitoring the insider may be as easy as using memory forensics. The revamped Memory Analysis course focuses on tasks that practitioners should regularly perform, providing investigators with the skills necessary to identify compromised endpoints and the knowledge to determine which of these endpoints holds the most critical data.”

The updated FOR526 course is available both live and online.