Digital Forensic Certification Practice Exam

Which tool provides the pslist plugin to retrieve information on all processes executing on a system?

1. Volatility Framework

2. Sysinternals Suite

3. Wireshark

4. Process Explorer

The correct answer is: Volatility Framework

The Volatility Framework is a well-known open-source memory forensics tool that is specifically designed to analyze memory dumps from a variety of operating systems. One of its key features is the pslist plugin, which provides a comprehensive list of all the processes that are currently being executed on a system from the memory image. This plugin extracts process-related information directly from the memory, allowing forensic analysts to identify running processes, their associated IDs, and other details like parent-child relationships and memory usage at the time of the capture. In contrast, the Sysinternals Suite primarily consists of utilities for monitoring and troubleshooting Windows systems, but it does not focus specifically on memory analysis or provide a dedicated pslist plugin. Tools like Wireshark are designed for network traffic analysis rather than memory forensics, and Process Explorer, while it is a powerful tool for observing processes and system resource usage, does not offer the capability to analyze memory dumps in the same way that Volatility does. Thus, the Volatility Framework stands out as the correct choice due to its dedicated approach to obtaining and analyzing process information from memory images.