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

Chapter 7: Advanced Dynamic Analysis Part 2 – Refusing to Take the Blue Pill

In the previous chapter, we discussed advanced dynamic analysis techniques for collecting tools, techniques, procedures, and other intelligence from malicious samples.

We'll build on techniques we've covered previously in order to examine some of the more advanced topics available to us as malware analysts in the dynamic analysis of samples we may obtain during our tenure.

After we cover each of these topics, you'll also have the opportunity to try your luck against a sample that will allow you to practice each of these techniques and check your understanding of the topics covered. While not a real-world sample of malware, the tricks and techniques utilized in its creation are reflective of real-world samples.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Leveraging API calls to understand malicious capabilities
  • Identifying common anti-analysis techniques
  • Identifying instructions...