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

Chapter 3 – Dynamic Analysis – Techniques and Tooling

The challenges in Chapter 3 focus on automation and dynamic analysis of samples. The answers are as follows:

  1. This malware sample does not appear to create a persistence mechanism immediately following execution.
  2. The file will write one decoded payload to C:\Users\Public\*.GOF with the SHA256 of 47b1f63e7db1c24ad6f692cf1eb0e92dd6de27a16051f390 f5b441afc5049fea.
  3. Checking for alternate data streams via PowerShell reveals no hidden data within our payload.
  4. If there were persistence mechanisms or files uncovered by our script(s), we could easily add a pipeline element to Remove-Item or similar in order to automate the removal of files and registry keys. The same could be used with scheduled tasks via Unregister-ScheduledTask.