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

Network-based deception

Often, we as analysts may want to execute malware without directly exposing our box to the internet, for a myriad of reasons covered in the first chapter. For this, tools such as the following are crucial:

  • FakeNet-NG
  • ApateDNS
  • Python's SimpleHTTPServer

We'll cover each of these and their use cases in deceiving our adversarial counterparts so that we may better understand the ends they are attempting to achieve.

FakeNet-NG

FakeNet is a fairly simple application. The application hooks into the network adapter, and "tricks" the malware into believing it is the primary network adapter. As it does so, it also records all traffic, including outbound HTTP and HTTP Secure (HTTPS) requests. The FakeNet-NG logo is shown here:

Figure 6.21 – The FakeNet-NG logo

Figure 6.21 – The FakeNet-NG logo

FakeNet can be started by searching in the Start menu and utilizing Ctrl + Shift + Enter to run the program as administrator. You...