Couple of interesting tools that seem to have been released recently:
ManTech Memory DD ManTech Memory DD captures a record of physical, or random access memory which is lost when the computer is shutdown. Released at no charge under the GPL license for government and private use, ManTech’s Memory DD (MDD) is capable of acquiring memory images from the following Microsoft® products: Windows® 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP®, Windows Vista®, and Windows Server 2008.
ManTech’s Memory DD 1.0 acquires a forensic image of physical memory and stores it as a raw binary file. To help verify data integrity and aid in the preservation of the evidence, the information captured by ManTech Memory DD is checked by the Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5), the common Internet standard used in security applications. The binary file can then be analyzed using external tools to identify items of interest to the examiner… can be downloaded here
Suiche – of ‘Sandman’ fame released a memory dumping tool
The main difference between ManTech tool and win32dd, is that win32dd is mainly a kernel mode application — then it avoids to use user-land API to write to an output file, everything is done with native functions. Thus, it means a faster dumping… This point isn’t negligible when you have one million page to dump in one single.