The term obfuscation refers to a process of obscuring meaningful information. Malware authors often use various obfuscation techniques to hide the information and to modify the malicious content to make detection and analysis difficult for a security analyst. Adversaries typically use encoding/encryption techniques to conceal the information from the security products. In addition to using encoding/encryption, an attacker uses a program such as packers to obfuscate the malicious binary content, which makes analysis and reverse engineering much more difficult. In this chapter, we will look at identifying these obfuscation techniques and how to decode/decrypt and unpack the malicious binaries. We will begin by looking at the encoding/encryption techniques, and later we will look at the unpacking techniques.
Adversaries typically use encoding and encryption...
