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

Discovering enumeration by the enemy

While not strictly part of dynamic analysis, sometimes in malware analysis, an infection will be accompanied by active enumeration and interactivity by an adversary.

This is done primarily through reconnaissance tools downloaded to the host and executed. Different threat actors have different tools they prefer, but the idea is always the same: discover more hosts, with more vulnerabilities or users, and exploit those to gain a larger foothold within the network.

Domain checks

Some actors will utilize enumeration to decide whether a target is worth attacking at all – for instance, in some Emotet binary executions, the binary will issue commands to check for a domain such as net user /domain to see what domain, if any, exists. If this check fails, it's likely not worth their time to interact with, and the execution may halt.

In the instance that a domain is found, the threat actor will probably attempt to enumerate the users...