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

Network IOCs – blocking at the perimeter

Some of the most powerful IOCs we uncover as analysts are those that are network-based. FQDNs, IPs, and other network-bound indicators are often utilized to control malware, attack machines, or download secondary stages that often contain the code meant to perform actions on objectives on our network – be that ransomware or otherwise.

The best solution we have to acting on these IOCs is certainly to block them at the network perimeter – at the egress point where the workstation attempts to call out to the known malicious IP, drop the packet, and pass the event to the SIEM stack to log and alert the SOC accordingly.

However, there are also considerations that we can take on workstations themselves via Group Policy or server configuration.

One of the ways we could go about this is to manually block outbound connections to the IP via the same firewall configuration tool that we utilized in the previous section. However...