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

Utilizing MITRE ATT&CK for C-level reporting

As we've just covered, ATT&CK is a wonderful framework for allowing breadth and depth of technical coverage as well as simply painting the broad strokes.

Often, when reporting to director-level (with a few exceptions), the few questions that will be asked are things like ''How did this happen?'', ''What was the impact?'', ''How did the attacker interact with our systems?'', and ''How can we prevent this?'' or ''How can we remediate this?''.

The MITRE technique framework allows us as analysts a pre-written guide on the techniques observed by the malicious sample we are currently studying.

For instance, the page on Signed Binary Proxy Execution via RunDLL32 offers a great snippet that explains how and why adversaries may utilize this technique, as well as mitigations that can be put in place to avoid being victimized by...