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

Utilizing the unknown.exe sample from the malware sample pack, and without running the application, attempt to answer the following questions utilizing any of the tools we've covered in this chapter – or any tools you're familiar with that provide the same information:

  1. Is the sample packed? What packer does it use?
  2. What kind of PE is this?
  3. If the sample is packed, unpack it. What's the raw size of the .text section after it's been unpacked?
  4. What DLLs does the sample import? Are there any suspicious functions called from these DLLs?
  5. If there are suspicious functions, name one, and what arguments it accepts from the function that calls them.
  6. Give a brief overview of the capabilities of this malware as you understand it.