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 packing

Packers are programs that are used most of the time to compress code in binary files (mostly EXE files). While these programs are not, in themselves, harmful and can in fact be used for a variety of useful purposes, malware authors tend to use packers to hide their code's intentions, making malware research more difficult and potentially aiding their code in thwarting static antivirus engines. This section of the book will present the major differences between regular and packed executables, explore how to detect packers, and explain how to defeat them. Central to this task is understanding the importance and maintenance of unpacking engines used by various types of antivirus software.

How packers work

To explain how packers work, we will run a simple "Hello World.exe" file through two different packers, Ultimate Packer for eXecutables (UPX) and ASPack, each of which uses a different packing technique.

In general, packers work...