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

Working with Process Monitor

Now that we have seen how to gather leads using Process Explorer as well as which antivirus processes are running and monitoring the actions of the operating system without any user involvement, we can continue gathering research leads. This time, we will find the process the antivirus software uses to conduct file scans. We'll locate this lead through operating system monitoring using the Process Monitor tool.

Processor Monitor (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon) is a tool that can be used to observe the behavior of each process in the operating system. For example, if we run the notepad.exe process, writing content into it, and then save the content into a file, Process Monitor will be able to see everything that happened from the moment we executed the process, until the moment we closed it, like in the following example:

Figure 2.11 – Actions of notepad.exe shown in Process Monitor

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