Evasive Malware

Understanding Deceptive and Self-Defending Threats

by Kyle Cucci

July 2024, 488 pp.

ISBN-13:

9781718503267

Download Chapter 8: Evading Sandboxes and Disrupting Analysis

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Dive into the fascinating and terrifying world of evasive malware—malicious software designed to avoid detection. The first of its kind, this thorough introduction is full of practical information, real-world examples, and cutting-edge techniques for discovering, reverse-engineering, and analyzing state-of-the-art malware.

Beginning with foundational knowledge about malware analysis in the context of the Windows OS, you'll learn about the evasive maneuvers that malware programs use to determine whether they’re being analyzed and the tricks they employ to avoid detection. You'll explore the ways malware circumvents security controls, such as network or endpoint defense bypasses, anti-forensics techniques, and malware that deploys data and code obfuscation. At the end of the book, you'll build your very own anti-evasion analysis lab.

You’ll learn:

Modern evasive malware threats
Anti-analysis techniques used in malware
How malware bypasses and circumvents security controls
How malware uses victim targeting and profiling techniques
How malware uses anti-forensics and file-less techniques
How to perform malware analysis and reverse engineering on evasive programs

Author Bio

Kyle Cucci has been hooked on computers since building a PC and buying a C++ book as a teenager. He has over 17 years of diverse experience in cyber- security and IT, and he is currently part of Proofpoint’s Threat Research team, with a day-to-day focus on hunting and reverse-engineering malware. Previously, Kyle led the malware research and forensic investigations team at a large global financial institution. Throughout his career, Kyle’s threat intelligence contributions and research have been featured in government intelligence reports and security tools and products. Kyle regularly speaks at security conferences and has led international trainings and workshops on topics such as malware analysis and security engineering. In his free time, Kyle enjoys contributing to the community via open source tooling and blogging, spending quiet time with his family, and brewing acceptably drinkable beer.

Table of contents

Introduction
Part I: The Fundamentals
Chapter 1: Windows Foundational Concepts
Chapter 2: A Crash Course in Malware Triage and Behavioral Analysis
Chapter 3: A Crash Course in Static and Dynamic Code Analysis
Part II: Context Awareness and Sandbox Evasion
Chapter 4: Enumerating Operating System Artifacts
Chapter 5: User Environment and Interaction Detection
Chapter 6: Enumerating Hardware and Network Configurations
Chapter 7: Runtime Environment and Virtual Processor Anomalies
Chapter 8: Evading Sandboxes and Disrupting Analysis
Part III: Anti-reversing
Chapter 9: Anti-disassembly
Chapter 10: Anti-debugging
Chapter 11: Covert Code Execution and Misdirection
Part IV: Defense Evasion
Chapter 12: Process Injection, Manipulation, and Hooking
Chapter 13: Evading Network and Endpoint Defenses
Chapter 14: An Introduction to Rootkits
Chapter 15: Fileless Malware and Anti-forensics
Part V: Other Topics
Chapter 16: Encoding and Encryption
Chapter 17: Packers and Unpacking Malware
Chapter 18: Tips for Building an Anti-evasion Analysis Lab
Appendix A: Evasion-Related Windows API Functions
Appendix B: Windows LOLbins and Example Usage
Appendix C: Further Reading

The chapters in red are included in this Early Access PDF.