Memory analysis is the inspection of a running system’s RAM to find code, data, and process state that may not exist on disk in a readable form. Security analysts use it to look at live processes, allocated memory regions, loaded modules, decrypted strings, and unpacked payloads. This is important because many malware samples hide their real behavior until execution begins.
In cyber security, memory analysis helps reveal obfuscated or encrypted malware after a loader unpacks it, injects it, or reconstructs it at runtime. It can expose shellcode, credentials, command-and-control addresses, and other indicators that file-only scanning might miss. Defenders use memory capture and forensic tools during incident response, sandboxing, and endpoint triage to confirm what a program actually did in memory, not just what it looked like on disk.