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

Antivirus bypass using timing-based techniques

In order to sell security products, antivirus vendors have to emphasize two central characteristics, as follows:

  • High level of detection—Protecting the user from threats
  • User-friendly—Comfortable user interface (UI), clear images, fast scans, and more

For example, we can look at a particular endpoint that has about 100,000 files. If we were to demand maximum detection from antivirus software, scanning all of those 100,000 files could take a few days—and, in a few cases, even longer. This is an extreme demand that antivirus vendors cannot possibly meet, and are not supposed to.

In order to avoid this kind of situation, antivirus vendors do everything possible to maximize wait time during a scan, even if this means that at best, detection is less precise, or at worst, that malware is not detected at all.

Antivirus vendors prefer to scan about 100,000 files in 24 minutes, with a detection rate...