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

Chapter 4: A Word on Automated Sandboxing

In the last chapter, we discussed utilizing PowerShell to automate some of the common tasks for incident response and triage related to malware. As we learned, utilizing scripting can greatly assist an analyst in collecting pertinent information and making informed decisions quickly.

In this chapter, we'll take those ideas one step further, and examine some of the common fully automated, public, or private malware analysis frameworks that are available to us as analysts and that may speed up our triage even further – without even committing time to scripting for each incident.

We'll examine the IOCs we can collect with a known sample of malware, and then present a challenge at the end of the chapter to test your knowledge gained against a real-world sample of ransomware!

In this chapter, we'll discuss the following topics:

  • Using HybridAnalysis
  • Using Any.Run
  • Installing and using Cuckoo Sandbox
  • ...