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

Summary

In this chapter, we've taken a look at some basic static analysis techniques, including generating static file fingerprints using hashing, fuzzy hashing when this is not enough, utilizing open source intelligence (OSINT) such as VirusTotal to avoid replicating work, and understanding strings that are present within a binary after compilation.

While basic, these techniques are powerful and comprise a base skillset required to be effective as a malware analyst, and we will build on each of these techniques in the coming chapters to perform more advanced analysis. To test your knowledge of the chapter, make sure you have gone through the Challenges section and seen how your static analysis skills stack up against real-world adversaries. In the next chapter, we'll be moving on from basic static analysis to dynamic analysis—actually executing our malware!