Книга: Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software
Назад: The Goals of Malware Analysis
Дальше: Types of Malware

Malware Analysis Techniques

Most often, when performing malware analysis, you’ll have only the malware executable, which won’t be human-readable. In order to make sense of it, you’ll use a variety of tools and tricks, each revealing a small amount of information. You’ll need to use a variety of tools in order to see the full picture.

There are two fundamental approaches to malware analysis: static and dynamic. Static analysis involves examining the malware without running it. Dynamic analysis involves running the malware. Both techniques are further categorized as basic or advanced.

Basic static analysis consists of examining the executable file without viewing the actual instructions. Basic static analysis can confirm whether a file is malicious, provide information about its functionality, and sometimes provide information that will allow you to produce simple network signatures. Basic static analysis is straightforward and can be quick, but it’s largely ineffective against sophisticated malware, and it can miss important behaviors.

Basic dynamic analysis techniques involve running the malware and observing its behavior on the system in order to remove the infection, produce effective signatures, or both. However, before you can run malware safely, you must set up an environment that will allow you to study the running malware without risk of damage to your system or network. Like basic static analysis techniques, basic dynamic analysis techniques can be used by most people without deep programming knowledge, but they won’t be effective with all malware and can miss important functionality.

Advanced static analysis consists of reverse-engineering the malware’s internals by loading the executable into a disassembler and looking at the program instructions in order to discover what the program does. The instructions are executed by the CPU, so advanced static analysis tells you exactly what the program does. However, advanced static analysis has a steeper learning curve than basic static analysis and requires specialized knowledge of disassembly, code constructs, and Windows operating system concepts, all of which you’ll learn in this book.

Advanced dynamic analysis uses a debugger to examine the internal state of a running malicious executable. Advanced dynamic analysis techniques provide another way to extract detailed information from an executable. These techniques are most useful when you’re trying to obtain information that is difficult to gather with the other techniques. In this book, we’ll show you how to use advanced dynamic analysis together with advanced static analysis in order to completely analyze suspected malware.

Назад: The Goals of Malware Analysis
Дальше: Types of Malware

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