How To Install Volatility on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Volatility on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The Volatility framework is a set of tools for memory forensics analysis, threat hunting, and extracting valuable information from RAM. This tool can easily be used with any of the following three operating systems i.e. Linux, macOS, and Windows.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Volatility framework on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Volatility on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install git

Step 2. Installing Python.

Run the following command to install Python and other required packages dependency:

sudo apt install python2.7 python3-pip python-setuptools build-essential python-dev-is-python2

For additional resources on installing Python, read the post below:

• How to install Python on Ubuntu Linux √

Step 3. Installing Distorm.

Next, we use pip modules to install Distorm 3:

sudo pip install distorm3==3.4.4

Step 4. Installing Volatility on Ubuntu 20.04.

To install you can simply clone the Git repository of Volatility:

git clone https://github.com/volatilityfoundation/volatility.git

Make this newly cloned file executable:

chmod +x volatility/vol.py

Next, move volatility on /opt directory and create a symlink to make it globally available:

sudo mv volatility /opt
sudo ln –s /opt/volatility/vol.py /usr/bin/vol.py

Step 5. Test the Volatility.

Finally, check Volatility is working. You should not get any errors:

vol.py --info

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Volatility. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Volatility memory analysis on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Volatility website.