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 4 – A Word on Automated Sandboxing

In Chapter 4, we discussed automated sandboxing. You were tasked with utilizing Cuckoo and a sample of the Locky ransomware to answer several questions about the characteristics of the binary. The answers are as follows:

  1. The sample appears to contact random domain names. This could be an attempt to ascertain via DNS whether or not a network is being emulated by a malware analyst as opposed to a live connection.
  2. The sample is packed. The leading indicator of a packed sample in this instance is the relatively high entropy of the PE sections shown in Cuckoo.
  3. The SHA256 of the unpacked binary in memory should be e1e9a4cc4dcbeb8 d07bb1209f071acc88584e6b405b887a20b00dd7fa7561ce7, which should be revealed in the Dropped Buffers section of Cuckoo.
  4. There are several indicators within the binary, but one in particular stands out in the Strings section of Cuckoo – a seemingly randomly generated PDB file string: Z:\as...