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 2: Static Analysis – Techniques and Tooling

Malware analysis is divided into two primary techniques: dynamic analysis, in which the malware is actually executed and observed on the system, and static analysis. Static analysis covers everything that can be gleaned from a sample without actually loading the program into executable memory space and observing its behavior.

Much like shaking a gift box to ascertain what we might expect when we open it, static analysis allows us to obtain a lot of information that may later provide context for behaviors we see in dynamic analysis, as well as static information that may later be weaponized against the malware.

In this chapter, we'll review several tools suited to this purpose, and several basic techniques for shaking the box that provide the best information possible. In addition, we'll take a look at two real-world examples of malware, and apply what we've learned to show how these skills and tools can...