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

Understanding the approaches to antivirus research

There are two main approaches to antivirus research. Both ultimately need to lead to the same result, which is always bypassing antivirus software and running malicious code on the user's endpoint.

The two antivirus research approaches are the following:

  • Finding a vulnerability in antivirus software
  • Using a detection bypass method

As with any code, antivirus software will also contain vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of. Sometimes, these vulnerabilities may allow controlling the antivirus software's means of detection, prevention, or both.

In upcoming sections, we will look at a few possible vulnerabilities that can help us bypass antivirus software.

Important note

There are a lot of vulnerabilities that we can use to bypass antivirus software, beyond the vulnerabilities we have mentioned in this chapter. For a more comprehensive list of vulnerabilities, check the following link:...