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 6 – Advanced Dynamic Analysis – Looking at Explosions

In this chapter, we took a deep dive into the nitty-gritty of dynamic analysis and what we can really learn about malware and its behavior by simply giving it an environment to destroy. You were tasked with answering several questions about the NetWalker ransomware threat – the answers are as follows:

  1. PowerShell spawns CSC.exe processes. Some research about these processes should tell you they're used for compiling executables from source code.
  2. No – it doesn't attempt to download any secondary stages. The script contains everything it needs to compile its payload DLL at runtime!
  3. Yes, it does – PowerShell utilizes its malicious DLL to inject code into the already running Explorer.exe process and encrypt the files.
  4. The DLL is loaded by reflective loading. This can be inferred by the fact that it's spawned within an existing process and by looking at the...