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

Behavioral prevention

Behavioral or heuristic protection is often the stuff of EDR or AV platforms. Most platforms of this nature operate on a heuristic basis and utilize key MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques leveraged by real-world adversaries in order to prevent the execution of malicious commands, files, or techniques. For the sake of this discussion, we'll focus on command-line style behaviors for the sake of simplicity – things such as calling mshta.exe to open malicious HTA files or calling binaries from SMB shares.

Frequently, a well-built EDR solution is going to be irreplaceable in correctly and properly blocking behavioral-based techniques utilized by adversaries. However, this is not the only methodology available to us at a pinch.

Binary and shell-based blocking

In the Unix world, the proper way to achieve something of this nature is via the use of something like rsh – a restricted shell that allows us to basically "jail" our...