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

Leveraging API calls to understand malicious capabilities

While it is not, strictly speaking, a component of dynamic analysis, techniques identified within this chapter will make broad use of the APIs offered by Windows in order to achieve their goals.

To this end, it is important to have a basic understanding of how we may leverage Windows API calls in malicious programs to better understand what the capabilities of these programs may be, and at what point in their execution flow they may make use (malicious or otherwise) of these APIs offered by the Windows environment. Before we begin, we'll take a quick primer on x86 assembly to understand what may be occurring within these calls.

x86 assembly primer

32-bit malware still comprises the large majority of malware seen in the wild today, and for good reason. Malware operators wish to maintain the broadest compatibility possible for their payloads. 64-bit computers are able to run the x86 instruction set, but the inverse...