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

Shortcomings of automated analysis tools

As you have probably gleaned by now, automated analysis tools are excellent for the initial analysis of a malicious sample and can provide a wealth of information in a brief period of time.

However, these automated analysis tools are not without their shortcomings. First, they are often reliant on signatures and heuristics to detect malicious activity and cannot apply the knowledge of a seasoned malware analyst to a sample. Put simply, they are still machines and their classifications are not always correct. They also may not be able to react to certain sample conditions, such as the usage of analysis evasion techniques, or packed samples.

Some shortcomings of public tools are addressed by private, own-infrastructure sandboxing utilities such as Cuckoo, but these often introduce other problems, such as infrastructure to run the sandboxing framework and the cost of people maintaining it.

It's important to keep in mind that while...