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

Deobfuscating malicious VBS scripts

In this section, we'll take a look at some of the methodologies we've learned about and learn a few shortcuts to de-obfuscating malicious VBS and VBA scripts within our Windows virtual machine (VM) to understand what the malicious author may be attempting to accomplish.

Malicious VB scripts are one of the more common methodologies in use throughout the history of malware as it's easy to code in, easy to learn, ubiquitous, and powerful within the environment that comprises most malware targets—Windows.

Utilizing VbsEdit

A free tool, VbsEdit, is one of the best methods to approach de-obfuscation of VB-based scripts. The tool can be obtained from the link within the Technical requirements section at the beginning of this chapter.

Once the tool is downloaded, proceed through the installation, accepting default options—they'll work perfectly.

Of note, the tool does have an optional license but it is not...