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

Common tooling for IOC-based blocking

In this section, we'll discuss and list out some of the common tooling we've used. While this book also endeavors to be vendor-agnostic and to not recommend specific EDR products, we'll also list out a few of those that are in common use and include the ability to block custom indicators of compromise.

File-based IOCs:

  • Group Policy
  • EDR tooling

Network-based IOCs:

  • Firewalls (Cisco, Juniper, SonicWALL, Fortigate, and so on; host-based firewalls)
  • DNS server configurations
  • IPSec rules (inbound traffic – RDP, specifically)
  • EDR tooling
  • Group Policy

EDR tooling:

  • CrowdStrike Falcon
  • Microsoft Defender ATP
  • VMWare Carbon Black
  • Qualys Vulnerability Management Platform
  • Many more…

Obviously, in authoring this book I have biases, and it is important to do one's due diligence and select the platform that is the best fit for the organization and...