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

Challenge

By this point in the chapter, we've built quite the script for collecting the most common IOCs that may be utilized by commodity malware. Now it is time to put your knowledge to the test! I encourage you to do this exercise manually first – timing yourself, and then complete it using the script we have created to see the difference.

Utilizing the malware sample link included at the beginning of this chapter, attempt to answer the following questions, courtesy of the WIZARD SPIDER adversarial group:

  1. What persistence mechanisms were utilized by this sample?
  2. How many files did the sample write? Where, and what, are their SHA256 hashes?
  3. Is there any hidden data?
  4. How could you alter your script to not only return the malware and persistence, but remove it?