Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

By : Chiheb Chebbi
Book Image

Mastering Machine Learning for Penetration Testing

By: Chiheb Chebbi

Overview of this book

Cyber security is crucial for both businesses and individuals. As systems are getting smarter, we now see machine learning interrupting computer security. With the adoption of machine learning in upcoming security products, it’s important for pentesters and security researchers to understand how these systems work, and to breach them for testing purposes. This book begins with the basics of machine learning and the algorithms used to build robust systems. Once you’ve gained a fair understanding of how security products leverage machine learning, you'll dive into the core concepts of breaching such systems. Through practical use cases, you’ll see how to find loopholes and surpass a self-learning security system. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll focus on topics such as network intrusion detection and AV and IDS evasion. We’ll also cover the best practices when identifying ambiguities, and extensive techniques to breach an intelligent system. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with identifying loopholes in a self-learning security system and will be able to efficiently breach a machine learning system.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Machine learning malware detection using API calls

Analyzing malware with API calls plays a huge role in malware analysis. Thus, APIs can give malware analysts an idea about malware behavior, especially when basic, static analysis wasn't successful due to obfuscation techniques (like packers, crypters, and protectors). Malware analysts can gain an understanding of how a malicious file works by studying API calls. There are many online tools that will give you the ability to analyze malware in a secure environment. Those utilities and environments are called sandboxes. Malware that is detected is identified by a hash function (MD5 or SHA256). Malware analysts use hashing to sign a file. For example, the following APIs were taken from the report of an online malware scan with https://www.hybrid-analysis.com.

These are some details about the malware "PE32 executable (GUI...