CISSP Security Operations Practice Question
Which digital forensics tool is specifically designed for memory forensics?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Volatility
Volatility is an open-source framework for extracting artifacts from RAM dumps.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Volatility
Why this is correct
Volatility is an open-source framework specifically designed for memory forensics, enabling investigators to extract and analyze digital artifacts from volatile memory (RAM) dumps. It allows for the examination of running processes, open network connections, loaded kernel modules, and user activity, which are crucial for incident response, malware analysis, and understanding the runtime state of a compromised system. Its capabilities are centered on analyzing live system memory rather than persistent storage.
- ✗
Wireshark
Why it's wrong here
Wireshark is a widely recognized network protocol analyzer used for capturing and interactively displaying network traffic in real-time or from saved capture files. While indispensable for network forensics, troubleshooting, and understanding communication patterns, its primary function is to inspect data packets traversing a network interface. It is not designed to analyze the contents of a system's volatile memory or persistent storage, making it unsuitable for memory forensics.
- ✗
EnCase
Why it's wrong here
EnCase is a comprehensive commercial digital forensics solution primarily utilized for acquiring, preserving, and analyzing data from various persistent storage devices, such as hard drives, solid-state drives, and mobile devices. It excels at recovering deleted files, examining file system structures, and performing extensive keyword searches across non-volatile storage. While powerful for disk forensics, it does not specialize in the real-time analysis of system memory contents.
- ✗
FTK
Why it's wrong here
Forensic Toolkit (FTK) is another prominent commercial software suite specifically engineered for digital forensics investigations, with a strong emphasis on disk and file system analysis. It empowers investigators to process vast amounts of data from diverse digital media, identify crucial evidence, and reconstruct events by scrutinizing file metadata, registry hives, and internet history. However, its core functionality is not centered on the dynamic analysis of volatile memory.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every CISSP question from scratch — 747 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CISSP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CISSP exam.