Every attack leaves a trail, but in containerized environments, that trail can vanish before you even realize you have been attacked. Containers are short-lived, and attackers exploit this by executing malware in memory, loading hidden payloads, or deploying rootkits, then silently modifying or deleting evidence to cover their tracks. By the time security teams are alerted, the proof may already be gone.
This challenge is especially urgent for SOC and Incident Response teams. As organizations move to the cloud, these teams are now responsible for investigating incidents in containerized and cloud native environments. Traditional investigation tools were built for physical servers and endpoints, not for workloads that start and stop in seconds. For SOC and IR teams, cloud native forensics is a new realm with unfamiliar rules, faster timelines, and little evidence to work with.
In older IT environments, forensic investigators relied on persistent systems where large memory dumps could be collected and analyzed. In cloud native environments, workloads are bigger, faster, and constantly changing. Full memory captures are impractical because of their size and complexity, leaving critical gaps for investigators. Detection alone is not enough. The real value lies in preserving evidence at the moment of attack and using it to reconstruct what happened, understand the full scope of an incident, and meet compliance requirements.
Container Memory Forensics for Cloud Native Applications
Aqua’s new Container Memory Forensics capability solves this problem by preserving volatile memory evidence in environments where everything is temporary. Instead of attempting to capture an entire workload memory dump, Aqua uses a patent-pending selective capture method that extracts only the most relevant areas of memory at the kernel level.
This approach generates a relatively small, yet comprehensive, automatic memory dump that retains the full forensic value necessary for investigation. It is the first practical way to perform memory forensics in containerized cloud environments. Forensic investigators can now use the most powerful investigative tool they rely on for endpoints and apply it to ephemeral workloads for the very first time.
How Aqua Container Memory Forensics Works
When Aqua’s Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) detects malicious activity, it automatically triggers a selective memory dump from the container.
The process works like this:
- AMP detects malware in a containerized workload
- Aqua automatically captures pre-selected memory segments
- The evidence is packaged and delivered to shared storage
- Incident Response teams can then investigate the dump using common forensic tools such as Volatility
This workflow ensures that evidence is captured and preserved in real time, without requiring manual intervention, and without overwhelming investigators with massive files that are impractical to handle in the cloud.
Watch the demo to see how Aqua’s selective container memory dump
streamlines investigation and uncovers deeper forensic insights in real time.
Security Use Cases: What You Can Learn from Container Memory Forensics
Container Memory Forensics provides investigators with a complete system snapshot during and after an incident. Analysts can reconstruct process trees, review running files, investigate in-memory payloads, and uncover secondary malware components. They can also view active network connections and open sockets to understand how the compromised container was communicating at the time of the attack. For advanced threats such as rootkits, memory dumps reveal kernel modules, syscall table manipulations, and malicious eBPF programs that attackers try to hide.
Together with Malware File Forensics, which preserves malware samples and related artifacts from the container filesystem, Container Memory Forensics closes one of the last remaining blind spots in cloud native incident response. Malware File Forensics shows you what went wrong by capturing the files and evidence that triggered the event. Container Memory Forensics shows you how it went wrong by revealing what occurred in memory at the exact moment of the attack, including the processes that ran, the code that executed, and the connections that were opened. Combined, these capabilities give IR and SOC a complete picture of both cause and impact, allowing them to understand an attack from every angle and respond with confidence.
Connecting the Dots with Process Lineage
Understanding what happened inside a container requires more than just evidence from memory. Investigators need to see how every process unfolded, what launched what, which commands were executed, and which application triggered the activity in the first place. This is where Process Lineage becomes essential.
Process Lineage maps the full chain of execution within a container, tracing every process back to its origin. It shows the relationships between parent and child processes, helping analysts understand whether an alert was triggered by legitimate application behavior or by something suspicious. For example, if a cryptominer or malicious binary is discovered in memory, Process Lineage reveals which process started it, how it was executed, and whether it was connected to a trusted application or introduced by an attacker.
Aqua builds this lineage in two ways. In behavioral detections, the lineage is constructed in real time as events occur, which prevents attackers from hiding or modifying their tracks. In runtime controls and AMP, the lineage is built reactively at the time of detection, giving investigators historical visibility even after the event has occurred. In both cases, the lineage data is added to the raw event, allowing SOC and IR teams to triage faster, confirm whether a detection is real or a false positive, and identify which application or process was compromised.
When combined with Container Memory Forensics, Process Lineage connects runtime activity with the evidence captured from memory. Analysts can follow the full investigative thread from the initial process that triggered the attack to the code that executed in memory and the payloads preserved by Aqua’s selective memory capture. Together, these capabilities give teams the power to reconstruct every step of an incident and understand the complete story behind an attack.
With Process Lineage joining Memory and File Forensics, Aqua provides a full view of runtime behavior and evidence preservation that transforms investigation and response.
Forensic Analysis: A Key to Smarter Runtime Protection
Aqua continues to expand its runtime forensics capabilities, building on the foundation of Malware File Forensics and now Container Memory Forensics. With Process Lineage, these capabilities come together to deliver the most complete view of what happens inside a container at any moment in time. For CISOs and SOC leaders, this means fewer blind spots, stronger compliance reporting, and faster, more confident investigations. Aqua ensures that even in the most dynamic environments, critical evidence is preserved, advanced threats are exposed, and attacks are fully contained.
Ready to see how Aqua helps your team capture, connect, and analyze runtime evidence before it disappears? Request a demo and see Container Memory Forensics and Process Lineage in action.
