Book Image

Antivirus Bypass Techniques

By : Nir Yehoshua, Uriel Kosayev
Book Image

Antivirus Bypass Techniques

By: Nir Yehoshua, Uriel Kosayev

Overview of this book

Antivirus software is built to detect, prevent, and remove malware from systems, but this does not guarantee the security of your antivirus solution as certain changes can trick the antivirus and pose a risk for users. This book will help you to gain a basic understanding of antivirus software and take you through a series of antivirus bypass techniques that will enable you to bypass antivirus solutions. The book starts by introducing you to the cybersecurity landscape, focusing on cyber threats, malware, and more. You will learn how to collect leads to research antivirus and explore the two common bypass approaches used by the authors. Once you’ve covered the essentials of antivirus research and bypassing, you'll get hands-on with bypassing antivirus software using obfuscation, encryption, packing, PowerShell, and more. Toward the end, the book covers security improvement recommendations, useful for both antivirus vendors as well as for developers to help strengthen the security and malware detection capabilities of antivirus software. By the end of this security book, you'll have a better understanding of antivirus software and be able to confidently bypass antivirus software.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Know the Antivirus – the Basics Behind Your Security Solution
5
Section 2: Bypass the Antivirus – Practical Techniques to Evade Antivirus Software
9
Section 3: Using Bypass Techniques in the Real World

Defining a lead

The antivirus research lead is a file that we know the purpose of in the overall operation of the antivirus software and that we have found suitable to add to our research. Lead files are the most relevant files in antivirus research.

We can compare lead gathering to the first stage of a penetration test, known as reconnaissance. When we are performing reconnaissance on a target, that information is a type of lead, and we can use it to advance toward accomplishing our goal.

To gather leads, we must discover how the antivirus software works on the operating system and what its flow is.

As we wrote earlier, the work environment we used to conduct these examples of lead gathering is Windows 10 with AVG 2020 installed. In order to gather leads, we used a range of dynamic malware analysis tools in this chapter, such as the Sysinternals suite (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite) and Regshot (https://sourceforge.net/projects...