Malware Analysis
👉 Overview
👀 What ?
Malware analysis is the process of dissecting malware to understand its inner workings, purpose, and effect on the infected systems. It is an essential aspect of cybersecurity as it helps in developing countermeasures and understanding the nature of threats.
🧐 Why ?
Malware analysis is crucial for several reasons. First, it allows cybersecurity professionals to understand how malware operates, which can help in developing countermeasures. Second, it aids in identifying who is behind the attack, their motivations, and techniques. Third, it can help organizations prepare for future threats by understanding the evolution of malware. Therefore, anyone interested in cybersecurity, especially those in roles such as incident responders, security analysts, or forensic investigators, should be interested in malware analysis.
⛏️ How ?
To perform malware analysis, you need a secure and isolated environment, often a virtual machine. The basic steps are: 1. Obtain the malware sample. 2. Set up an isolated environment. 3. Execute the malware. 4. Monitor the behavior of the malware (system changes, network activity, etc.). 5. Analyze the data collected. Remember, handling malware is risky and should only be done by trained professionals.
⏳ When ?
Malware analysis emerged as a practice in the late 1980s with the advent of computer viruses. It became more prominent in the late 1990s and early 2000s when malware attacks became more frequent and destructive.
⚙️ Technical Explanations
Malware analysis is a comprehensive process that involves examining, dissecting, and understanding malware and its components. It's crucial to cyber security as it aids in identifying threats, understanding their workings and ultimately creating countermeasures.
The analysis can be broken down into three main types: static, dynamic, and manual code reversing.
- Static analysis is the first step, where the malware is examined without running it. This involves checking the file hashes, which are unique identifiers for files, to compare with known malicious hashes. Strings, or readable portions of the code, are also examined to find any suspicious or known malicious code snippets. Header information, which includes metadata about the file, is also scrutinized for any anomalies.
- Dynamic analysis is the next step and involves executing the malware in a controlled, isolated environment to observe its behavior and interactions with the network and system. This can offer valuable insights on what the malware is designed to do, such as whether it's intended to steal data, damage system files, create a backdoor, etc. The behaviors observed can then be compared with known malware behaviors to further classify and understand the malware.
- Manual code reversing is the most complex form of analysis. This involves going through the actual code of the malware. This is usually done in a form called assembly language, a low-level programming language. This process requires strong knowledge in programming and assembly languages and can give very detailed insights into the malware's workings, including its techniques to avoid detection, propagate, and perform its malicious activities.
The information gathered from malware analysis is invaluable in building threat intelligence, identifying indicators of compromise (IoCs), and developing countermeasures. Threat intelligence is knowledge that helps organizations understand and mitigate cyber threats. IoCs are pieces of evidence that a network or system has been breached. Countermeasures are steps taken to prevent or mitigate the effects of threats.