Free Memoryze Tool Gets A Much Needed GUI

When software vendors release a "free" version, there is often a catch or some limitation that leaves you wanting for more. Rarely is the release good enough to fill a void that you've been missing. But that's not always the case. A good example is the NetWitness Investigator product that I've been testing and wrote about in Friday's Tech Insight. It's a good product, and the limitation of being able to open up to only 25 1-GB capture files is so trivial that I hate to call it a limitation. Another example is Mandiant Memoryze.Mandiant released its Memoryze tool at the end of October, and while it wasn't crippled in functionality, interpreting the results required loading the XML files into Internet Explorer or Excel for easy viewing. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the initial release probably put off some people who took a look at the XML file and decided it was too hard and moved on. Yes, I know it's sad, but it happens. Hearing the cries for help, Mandiant's Peter Silberman -- in his off-hours, according to the Mandiant M-unition blog -- put together a nice python-based GUI to interpret the audit results produced by Memoryze.

There are just a few prerequisites to run Audit Viewer: Memoryze, Python (2.5 or 2.6) and the wxPython library. The User Guide contains links to the Python files. Once those are installed, double-clicking AuditViewer.py brings up the GUI where you can analyze live memory of the host you're on or a previously captured image file and view the audits created by previous analysis using Memoryze.

The layout of the interface is designed for easy navigation with four main tabs that cover the four primary audits that Memoryze can do: processes, driver signatures, driver module list. and rootkit detection. Clicking each one shows one to three panes and additional tabs for drilling deeper into the information provided by each audit. One key feature of Memoryze is that it does support analysis of physical memory images from other tools, including Mantech's DD (or MDD) and win32dd, so audits of memory dumps from those files can be viewed in Audit Viewer also.

I've been using Memoryze since it was released, and I'm extremely happy to finally have an easy-to-user viewer for the audit results. If you haven't tried Memoryze yet, set aside a little bit of time to test-drive it in your lab. It's the only free Windows physical memory imaging tool that doubles as an analysis tool. I think the addition of Audit Viewer is going to help it find a home in more incident response toolkits. Thanks, Peter!

John H. Sawyer is a Senior Security Engineer on the IT Security Team at the University of Florida. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are his own and do not represent the views and opinions of the UF IT Security Team or the University of Florida. When John's not fighting flaming, malware-infested machines or performing autopsies on blitzed boxes, he can usually be found hanging with his family, bouncing a baby on one knee and balancing a laptop on the other. Special to Dark Reading.