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

Picking up the pieces

In addition to simple fingerprints of files, be they fuzzy or otherwise, a file can give us several other basic pieces of information about it without executing. Attackers have a few simple tricks that are frequently used to attempt to slow down analysis of malware.

Malware serotyping

Take, for instance, our current sample—888888.png; if we open this file as a .png image, it appears to be corrupt!

Adversaries frequently change the extension of files, sometimes excluding it altogether and sometimes creating double extensions, such as notmalware.doc.exe, in order to attempt to obfuscate their intentions, bypass EDR solutions, or utilize social engineering to entice a user into executing their payload.

Fortunately for malware analysts, changing a file's extension does not hide its true contents, and serves only as an aesthetic change in most regards. In computing, all files have a header that indicates to the operating system how to interpret...