analyzing-memory-images

analyzing-memory-images is a skill for Claude Code from trilwu/secskills. It costs 81 tokens per session (3,938 once invoked), scanned B, original, MIT.

A guide to examining memory images, which are snapshots of a computer's RAM, using Volatility 3. It looks for running processes, injected code, credentials, network connections, rootkits, and other data that may never have been saved to disk.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate RAM dumps from compromised hosts, enumerate processes, detect process injection or rootkits, extract credential material, inspect network activity, and build a timeline of memory-resident events.
Why use it?
Some evidence disappears when a machine shuts down or is cleaned, including decrypted malware, injected code, and active connections. Memory analysis can recover these short-lived clues.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the secskills-defense plugin — 22 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate RAM dumps from compromised hosts, enumerate processes, detect process injection or rootkits, extract credential material, inspect network activity, and build a timeline of memory-resident events.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add trilwu/secskills --skill analyzing-memory-images
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trilwu/secskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install secskills-defense, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 22 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for analyzing-memory-images

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for analyzing-memory-images

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-memory-images.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,938 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high YARA Match · line 176
    YARA rule matched a known malware signature (reverse shell, backdoor, ransomware, C2 framework, or info stealer).
    Fix: Remove the malware payload or compromised file entirely. Investigate how it entered the skill and audit all other artifacts for additional indicators of compromise.
  • medium Privilege Escalation · line 38
    Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
    Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
  • medium Privilege Escalation · line 40
    Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
    Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00081 $0.03938
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.01969
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00788
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00394

Measured 9d ago against content hash 480b131ba124, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

analyzing-memory-images scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

sudo insmod lime-$(uname -r).ko "path=/evidence/mem.lime format=lime"
Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

secskills-defense/skills/analyzing-memory-images/SKILL.md · 384 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 384 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analyzing Memory Images

Memory is the only place certain artifacts exist — injected code, decrypted payloads, credential material, and network connections from processes that have already exited. Disk forensics misses all of these. The work is getting the image before it is lost, then asking the right questions in the right order.

When to Use

  • You have a memory dump (raw, LiME, EWF, crash dump, or VM snapshot) to analyze
  • Investigating a compromised host and need artifacts that exist only in RAM
  • Looking for injected code, process hollowing, or reflective DLL loading
  • Extracting credential material — hashes, Kerberos tickets, cached credentials
  • Identifying network connections and listening ports from a point-in-time capture
  • Detecting kernel-level rootkits — SSDT hooks, DKOM, hidden drivers

When NOT to Use

  • Broader incident response methodology — use responding-to-incidents
  • You have an acquired disk image, not a RAM capture — use analyzing-disk-images
  • On-disk artifacts of a live/triage Windows host — use investigating-windows-endpoints
  • Analyzing a known malware sample on disk — use analyzing-malware
  • Writing detection rules from your memory findings — use engineering-detections

Acquisition

Acquire memory before doing anything else on a live system. Every command you run on the box changes what is in memory. Image first, triage second.

# Linux — LiME (kernel module, minimal footprint)
sudo insmod lime-$(uname -r).ko "path=/evidence/mem.lime format=lime"
# Alternative: AVML (no kernel module needed, userspace)
sudo ./avml /evidence/mem.lime

# Windows — WinPMem (signed driver)
winpmem_mini_x64.exe mem.raw
# Alternative: DumpIt (single executable, click-to-run for non-technical staff)
DumpIt.exe /OUTPUT mem.raw /QUIET

# macOS — osxpmem is dead (Rekall archived, last release 2017, Intel-only, and
# blocked by SIP/kext restrictions on Big Sur+ and all Apple Silicon). Full-RAM
# capture on a modern Mac needs commercial tooling with Apple entitlements
# (e.g. Volexity Surge Collect); otherwise take process-scoped dumps and
# record that physical memory was not obtainable. See responding-to-incidents.

# VM snapshots — no agent needed
# VMware:   .vmem file alongside the .vmx (suspend the VM first for consistency)
# Hyper-V:  checkpoint creates .bin and .vsv in the snapshot directory
# KVM/QEMU: virsh dump <domain> mem.raw --memory-only
# VirtualBox: VBoxManage debugvm <name> dumpvmcore --filename mem.elf

# Crash dumps — partial but sometimes all you have
# Windows:  %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP (complete dump), or minidumps
# Linux:    /var/crash/, kdump output, /proc/kcore (live, pseudo-file)

Read the full file on GitHub · 384 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 384 lines · 81 tokens per session scan B 480b131ba124

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analyzing-memory-images is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (137 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 3,938 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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