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

Permission problems in antivirus software

The following are two examples of permission problems that can arise with antivirus software.

Insufficient permissions on the static signature file

During our research, we found antivirus software whose static signature file had insufficient permissions. This meant that any low-privileged user could erase the contents of the file. When the antivirus software then scanned files, it would be comparing them to an empty signature file.

We notified the antivirus vendor about this vulnerability and they released an update with a patch that fixed the vulnerability.

Improper privileges

Permission problems can occur not only in antivirus software but in all kinds of security solutions. In one of our research journies, we researched a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) security solution of company named Symantec. This software's primary goal is to block and prevent the leakage of sensitive data from the organization's network endpoints...