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

Summary

In this chapter, we've discussed several fairly complex ideas revolving around the dynamic and hybrid analysis of malware, ranging from understanding API calls that malware may utilize to further its ends, avoid analysis, and generally wreak havoc within our environment, to how malware may utilize commercial and custom packers to attempt to obfuscate their true nature or make analysis more difficult.

We've also discovered how we may leverage this knowledge and defeat these mechanisms with tools such as x32 and x64dbg, as well as plugins such as Scylla, and tools such as the NSA's Ghidra. While these are complex topics, they become far easier the more they are practiced – the more time you spend in Ghidra or a debugger, the more comfortable the tools become, regardless of the relative complexity of the ideas surrounding them.

In the next chapters, we'll take a few steps back from the technical complexity and focus on easier-to-understand and...