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

Using PowerShell for triage

The most important aspect of responding to a malware incident is triage. During this step of the process, we ascertain the impact the malware running on our hosts has had, and answer a few questions:

  • What files were written to the system?
  • What persistence mechanisms exist, if any?
  • What was the initial vector responsible for infection?
  • What are the roles of the artifacts we've identified as a result of answering the other questions?

Triage can be a time-consuming process, and if multiple incidents exist within the same timeframe, it may be difficult to adequately assess each incident in a timely manner – and time is often of the essence in a security incident.

Thankfully, PowerShell is here to help, and is installed out of the box on all Windows environments since Windows 7. Because of the ubiquity of this powerful scripting engine (and the ubiquity of Windows malware), it makes an obvious choice for scripting initial...