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

Avoiding rediscovery of the wheel

We have already established a great way of gaining information about a file via cryptographic hashing—akin to a file's fingerprint. Utilizing this information, we can leverage other analysts' hard work to ensure we do not dive deeper into analysis and waste time if someone has already analyzed our malware sample.

Leveraging VirusTotal

A wonderful tool that is widely utilized by analysts is VirusTotal. VirusTotal is a scanning engine that scans possible malware samples against several antivirus (AV) engines and reports their findings.

In addition to this functionality, it maintains a database that is free to search by hash. Navigating to https://virustotal.com/ will present this screen:

Figure 2.4 – The VirusTotal home page

Figure 2.4 – The VirusTotal home page

In this instance, we'll use as an example a 275a021bbfb6489e54d471899f7db9d1 663fc695ec2fe2a2c4538aabf651fd0f SHA256 hash. Entering this hash into VirusTotal and...