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

Locating secondary stages

As we alluded to in the previous sections, often, the obvious malware or the initial binary we receive an alert for is not the only malicious binary on disk. Frequently, secondary executables are written that may not be immediately apparent.

In cases such as this, we can utilize PowerShell to gain a list of every file that has been written in the past day (or other period) to determine whether anything appears out of place or malicious:

Figure 3.27 – A PowerShell scriptlet for checking files written in the past 24 hours

Figure 3.27 – A PowerShell scriptlet for checking files written in the past 24 hours

You may have noted that we've both selected the full name of the files in question and loaded them into an array before printing them to screen. This is because we can utilize this for further processing.

Although, computationally speaking, it may be intensive, we can elect to bulk-compute SHA256 hashes with this list by piping the array to Get-FileHash, although this is not necessarily recommended...