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

Checking user logons

Sometimes, we are semi-lucky as an analyst and can find a user logon event that corresponds to the malicious activity, as we have observed in our EDR platform of choice or SIEM event.

Frequently with threat actors, malicious code will be immediately preceded by an RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) logon via brute-force or dumped credentials, or even via PSExec or WMI lateral movement. These methods all have one thing in common: they will create a Type 3 or Type 10 logon event in the Windows Security log. Being able to quickly ascertain which user credentials are compromised, or may have been compromised, is key to quickly containing an incident.

PowerShell makes parsing event logs very easy with the Get-WinEvent cmdlet. Here, we can filter by day, utilizing the $Before and $After variables, and return the corresponding events, to be correlated with the malicious activity observed in our SIEM or EDR:

Figure 3.26 – Checking terminal services logins via the Get-WinEvent cmdlet

Figure 3.26 – Checking terminal...