Book Image

Malware Analysis Techniques

By : Dylan Barker
Book Image

Malware Analysis Techniques

By: Dylan Barker

Overview of this book

Malicious software poses a threat to every enterprise globally. Its growth is costing businesses millions of dollars due to currency theft as a result of ransomware and lost productivity. With this book, you'll learn how to quickly triage, identify, attribute, and remediate threats using proven analysis techniques. Malware Analysis Techniques begins with an overview of the nature of malware, the current threat landscape, and its impact on businesses. Once you've covered the basics of malware, you'll move on to discover more about the technical nature of malicious software, including static characteristics and dynamic attack methods within the MITRE ATT&CK framework. You'll also find out how to perform practical malware analysis by applying all that you've learned to attribute the malware to a specific threat and weaponize the adversary's indicators of compromise (IOCs) and methodology against them to prevent them from attacking. Finally, you'll get to grips with common tooling utilized by professional malware analysts and understand the basics of reverse engineering with the NSA's Ghidra platform. By the end of this malware analysis book, you’ll be able to perform in-depth static and dynamic analysis and automate key tasks for improved defense against attacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Basic Techniques
6
Section 2: Debugging and Anti-Analysis – Going Deep
11
Section 3: Reporting and Weaponizing Your Findings
14
Section 4: Challenge Solutions

Identifying obfuscation techniques

Several obfuscation techniques are common across scripting languages, and it's important that we understand what is being done in an attempt to slow down analysis of a dropper or piece of malware and hinder incident response. We'll take a brief overview of some of the more common techniques that are utilized by adversaries in an attempt to prevent analysis within this section.

String encoding

One of the more common techniques utilized both within PowerShell and VBS or VBA malicious scripts is the encoding of strings. Encoding of strings, or function and variable names, makes the code harder to follow and analyze, as it is no longer written in plain English (or any other human-readable language). There are a few choices that are popular, but we'll cover the most popular ones.

Base64 encoding

Base64 is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that allows users to input any American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII...