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 a single malicious functionality

One of the central problems that antivirus software vendors need to deal with is false positives. Antivirus software is not supposed to report to the user every single little insignificant event taking place on the endpoint. If it does, the user may be forced to abandon the antivirus software and switch to another antivirus software that creates fewer interruptions during regular use.

To deal with false-positive detection, antivirus vendors increase their detection rate. For example, if a file is not signed in the static and dynamic engines, the heuristic engine goes into operation and starts to calculate on its own whether the file is malicious using all sorts of parameters. For example, the antivirus software will try to determine whether the file is opening a socket, performing dropping into the persistence folder, and receiving commands from a remote server. The rate can be 70%, for example, that the file is detected as...