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 7 – Advanced Dynamic Analysis Part 2 – Refusing to Take the Blue Pill

Here, we discussed some more advanced topics revolving around Windows API functionality and manually unpacking malware. In the challenges in this section, you were tasked with answering a series of questions about a likely packed executable:

  1. Yes – the sample is packed. Based on your research, you should find that it is packed with a packer called MPress.
  2. The SHA256 of the unpacked sample is a23ef053cccf6a35fda9adc5f1702 ba99a7be695107d3ba5d1ea8c9c258299e4.
  3. The only imported functions in the packed sample are as follows:

    GetModuleHandleA

    GetProcAddress

    GetDC

    Arc

    PrintDlgW

    FreeSid

    DragFinish

    OleRun

    StrChrIA

    ImageList_Add

    Comparing this list to the list of imports once the sample is unpacked shows quite a difference!

  4. The sample has several functions that could ostensibly be used for analysis avoidance, but the easiest to spot is Sleep()! This could be utilized to evade automated...