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 Autoruns

As in all operating systems, Windows contains many places where persistence may be used, and just as malware authors do, antivirus companies want to make use of persistence to start their processes when the operating system starts up.

In Windows, there are many places where it is possible to place files that will be started when the operating system starts up, such as the following:

  • HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
  • HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\Run
  • %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

But you will not need to memorize all these locations, because there is a tool called Autoruns (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns) for exactly this purpose.

Using Autoruns, we can display all the locations where persistence...