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Detect and analyze heap spray attacks in memory dumps using Volatility3 plugins to identify NOP sled patterns, shellcode landing zones, and suspicious large allocations in process virtual address space.
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Based on SOC occupation classification
| name | analyzing-heap-spray-exploitation |
| description | Detect and analyze heap spray attacks in memory dumps using Volatility3 plugins to identify NOP sled patterns, shellcode landing zones, and suspicious large allocations in process virtual address space. |
| domain | cybersecurity |
| subdomain | malware-analysis |
| tags | ["malware-analysis","memory-forensics","heap-spray","volatility3","exploit-analysis"] |
| version | 1.0 |
| author | mahipal |
| license | Apache-2.0 |
| nist_csf | ["DE.AE-02","RS.AN-03","ID.RA-01","DE.CM-01"] |
Heap spraying is an exploitation technique that fills large regions of a process's heap with attacker-controlled data (typically NOP sleds followed by shellcode) to increase the reliability of code execution exploits. This skill covers detecting heap spray artifacts in memory dumps using Volatility3's malfind, vadinfo, and memmap plugins, identifying suspicious contiguous memory allocations, scanning for NOP sled patterns (0x90, 0x0c0c0c0c), and extracting embedded shellcode for analysis.
volatility3 framework installedUse Volatility3 windows.malfind to scan for processes with executable injected memory regions.
Examine VAD tree entries using windows.vadinfo for large contiguous allocations with RWX permissions.
Search suspicious memory regions for NOP sled signatures (0x90 sequences, 0x0c0c0c0c patterns).
Dump suspicious memory regions and identify shellcode using byte pattern analysis.
JSON report with suspicious processes, heap spray indicators, NOP sled locations, memory region sizes, and extracted shellcode hashes.
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