https://intezer.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-malware-analysis-and-reverse-engineering/
https://archive.ph/U2ZWQ
Malware analysis and reverse engineering are powerful but can also be challenging and time-consuming. Performing a thorough analysis typically requires deep knowledge, specialized tools, and extensive experience. However, not every security analyst has the expertise or the resources to conduct an exhaustive investigation for every suspicious file they encounter. Moreover, a comprehensive, in-depth reverse engineering effort isn’t always necessary or practical, for example, if another researcher has already reported and documented the file.
This blog series on “Breaking down malware” introduces a flexible, practical approach to malware analysis. Our goal is to guide you through determining the level of analysis required based on the context and initial findings. We will explore various techniques and tools that can help you efficiently assess a suspicious file, quickly determining whether a deeper dive is warranted or if initial triage provides sufficient insight.
[...] Malware (short for malicious software) analysis involves examining malicious software to understand its behavior, capabilities, and effects. By gaining insights into how malware functions, security teams can create effective detection, mitigation, and prevention strategies. It resembles digital forensics, where analysts serve as detectives, dissecting malware to uncover its mechanisms and defense methods. Just as doctors research diseases to develop cures, security researchers study malware to improve defense systems.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday October 27, @11:57AM (1 child)
Case of TLDR, just skimmed. I would be mainly interested in dynamic analysis, which seems to the only reliable way to automate malware detection. Does anybody know about how AV vendors go about this? I guess, the race is on, and sophisticated malware will try to detect whether it is running in a sandbox (being incubated so to speak). Do sandboxes emulate user behavior, or is it just a matter of downloading and installing stuff and monitoring files?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday October 27, @02:08PM
Dynamic analysis by running in sandbox is inferior approach. Using it indicates the analyst already failed to understand the code logic in static reading and is undertooled for evaluating code fragments statically.
Since 8-bit and 16-bit times, wild code used to have plenty of ways to detect unwanted debugging, systematic flow divergence based on hardware time domain is one of such strategy.
Not just malware, but games (and their copy-protection schemes, mostly) did that often. That defeats naive dynamic analysis.
On post-modern hardware, such divergence can be achieved trivially by CPU caching.
In funny AI-automated environments of today (which is a business domain of said article writer), time and space consuming cloaking by divergent hyper-recursion may prevent dynamic analysis to ever complete...
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.