// Comparison

The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 2 vs The Art of Memory Forensics: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Malware, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Advanced

4/52025

Detecting Malicious Software

Patrick Wardle

The detection-focused sequel to Volume 1, Wardle turns from analyzing Mac malware to building the heuristics and tooling that catch it, using macOS's security frameworks and real-world malware samples throughout.

Advanced

5/52014

The Art of Memory Forensics

Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory

Michael Hale Ligh, Andrew Case, Jamie Levy, AAron Walters

Ligh, Case, Levy, and Walters' canonical reference on memory analysis with Volatility — the technique, the tooling, and the operating-system internals it depends on, across Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Read this if

Detection engineers and blue teamers who already have Volume 1's analysis grounding and now need to build detections, not just read samples. Shows how to program against macOS's own security-centric frameworks (Endpoint Security, ESF) rather than relying only on third-party AV.

Incident responders, threat hunters, and malware analysts moving past disk forensics into the place where modern attackers actually live: in memory, in transit, and unbacked by files on disk. Also the textbook for the GCFA-and-beyond DFIR career path.

Skip this if

Readers who haven't worked through Volume 1's foundations first (Mach-O, code signing, persistence taxonomy); this book assumes that vocabulary and builds detection logic on top of it rather than re-teaching it.

Beginners with no OS-internals background; the book assumes you know what a process, a handle, and a kernel object are. Also dated on Volatility 3 — written for 2.x — though the conceptual material translates cleanly.

Key takeaways

Detection, not just analysis, is the book's whole focus — moving from "what is this sample doing" to "how do I catch the next one like it."
Builds heuristics directly on top of macOS's own security frameworks (Endpoint Security) instead of treating the OS as a black box.
Every technique is grounded in real malware families Wardle has tracked through Objective-See, not synthetic examples.

Memory is the only place where modern post-exploitation tools are guaranteed to be honest; the book makes that argument by showing what you can recover that disk cannot.
Volatility plugins are an investigative grammar — once you know the verbs, you can construct the questions; the book is the dictionary for the grammar.
Cross-OS memory forensics is one workflow with three dialects; the unified Windows/Linux/macOS coverage is the book's underrated structural choice.

How they compare

We rate The Art of Memory Forensics higher (5/5 against 4/5 for The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 2). For most readers, that means The Art of Memory Forensics is the primary pick and The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 2 is a useful follow-up.

Both books target advanced-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 2 and The Art of Memory Forensics both cover Malware, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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The Art of Mac Malware, Volume 2

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