Analyzing processes and process memory

Processes can be analyzed both to look for anomalies and identify potentially malicious processes, and to observe user activity. As before, Volatility provides a number of plugins for obtaining data about processes and their memory. For example, the mac_pslist, mac_pstree, and mac_tasks plugins can be used to get a list of processes. From a practical point of view, mac_tasks is considered the most reliable source of information on active processes. This plugin, unlike mac_pslist, enumerates tasks and searches for the process objects instead of relying on a linked list of processes, which can be corrupted during macOS memory acquisition. Nevertheless, during testing on the latest versions of the operating system, the mac_pstree plugin turns out to be the most efficient, correctly displaying results for macOS on both Intel and M1 chips.

The plugins are launched in the same way as for Windows and Linux:

Figure 11.6 –...