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

Protection rings in the Windows operating system

The lower the ring, the more privileges and visibility it has in the overall operating system. As the wise saying goes, "With great power comes great responsibility". Here are brief descriptions of the roles of each of these rings, moving from the outside in:

  • Ring 3 – This ring is also known as "user mode", "userland", or "userspace". As the name suggests, this ring is where the user interacts with the operating system, mainly through the GUI (Graphical User Interface) or command line.

    Any action taken by a program or process in the operating system is actually transferred to the lower rings. For example, if a user saves a text file, the operating system handles it by calling a Windows API function such as CreateFile(), which, in turn, transfers control to the kernel (Ring 0). The kernel, in turn, handles the operation by transferring the logical instructions to the final bits, which...