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

Examining NTFS (NT File System) alternate data streams

Sometimes, an attacker will write a file containing malicious code of a non-zero size, but when you examine the contents of the file, it will either be gibberish padding, or entirely blank.

Many junior analysts have fallen victim to this methodology, which hides data in plain sight by assuming that the data they view in the primary data stream is entirely meaningless.

We can utilize our previously collected array of recently written files to check for NTFS alternate data streams and return the contents of any that are outside the normal $:DATA data stream, where the data is stored by default in normal files. Any file with an alternate data stream should be regarded as highly suspect and examined closely by an analyst:

Figure 3.28 – A loop that will return all files that have NTFS ADS

Figure 3.28 – A loop that will return all files that have NTFS ADS

Analysis tip

NTFS also utilizes alternate data streams to store some file metadata – the &quot...