A Complete Malware Analysis Tutorial, Cheatsheet & Tools List – 2023

Analyzing the malware to break down its function and infection routine is a kind of tough job. here we describe the complete Malware Analysis Tutorials, tools, and elaborate cheatsheet.

Also, Read; Became a Certified Malware Analyst

What is Malware Analysis?

Malware analysis is a process of analyzing the samples of malware families such as Trojan, viruses, rootkits, ransomware, and spyware in an isolated environment to understand the infection, type, purpose, and functionality by applying the various methods based on its behavior to understand the motivation and applying the appropriate mitigation by creating rules and signature to prevent the users.

Malware Analysis Tutorials

In this malware analysis tutorial, we are focusing on various types of analysis and related malware analysis tools that are mainly used to break down the malware.

• Static Malware Analysis
• Dynamic Malware Analysis
• Memory Forensics
• Malware Detection
• Web Domain Analysis
• Network interactions Analysis
• Debugging & Debugger
• Analyze malicious URLs
• Sandboxes Technique

What is Static Malware Analysis?

This procedure includes extraction and examination of different binary components and static behavioral inductions of an executable, for example, API headers, Referred DLLs, PE areas, and all the more such assets without executing the samples.

Any deviation from the normal outcomes is recorded in the static investigation comes about and the decision is given likewise.

Static analysis is done without executing the malware whereas dynamic analysis was carried out by executing the malware in a controlled environment.

1. Disassembly – Programs can be ported to new computer platforms, by compiling the source code in a different environment.

2. File Fingerprinting – network data loss prevention solutions for identifying and tracking data across a network

3. Virus Scanning -Virus scanning tools and instructions for malware & virus removal. Remove malware, viruses, spyware, and other threats. ex: VirusTotal, Payload Security

4. Analyzing memory artifacts – During the time spent breaking down memory ancient rarities like[RAM dump, pagefile.sys, hiberfile.sys] the inspector can begin Identification of the Rogue Process

5. Packer Detection – Packer Detection is used to Detect packers, cryptos, Compilers, Packers Scrambler, Joiners, and Installers.+ New Symbols+.

Static Malware Analysis Tools

Hybrid-analysis
Virustotal.com
BinText
Dependency Walker
IDA
Md5deep
PEiD
Exeinfo PE
RDG Packer
D4dot
PEview

What is Dynamic Malware Analysis?

Dynamic analysis should always be an analyst’s first approach to discovering malware functionality.

In dynamic analysis, will be building a virtual machine that will be used as a place to do malware analysis.

In addition, malware will be analyzed using malware sandbox and monitoring process of malware and analysis packets data made by malware.

 An important consideration in Virtual Environment

very important to isolate the environment to avoid escaping the Malware.

• single path (execution trace) is examined
• analysis environment possibly not invisible
• analysis environment possibly not comprehensive
• scalability issues
• allow to quickly restore the analysis environment
• might be detectable (x86 virtualization problems)

Dynamic analysis tools:

Procmon
Process Explorer
Anubis
Comodo Instant Malware Analysis
Process MonitorRegshot
ApateDNS
OllyDbg
Regshot
Netcat
Wireshark

Malware Analysis Tutorials – Memory Forensics

• mage the full range of system memory (no reliance on API calls).
• Image a process’ entire address space to disk, including a process’ loaded DLLs, EXEs, heaps, and stacks.
• Image a specified driver or all drivers loaded in memory to disk.
• Hash the EXE and DLLs in the process address space (MD5, SHA1, SHA256.)
• Verify the digital signatures of the EXEs and DLLs (disk-based).
• Output all strings in memory on a per-process basis.

Important Tools

•  WinDbg –Kernel debugger for Windows systems
•  Muninn – A script to automate portions of analysis using Volatility
•  DAMM –Differential Analysis of Malware in Memory, built on Volatility
•  FindAES –Find AES encryption keys in memory
•  Volatility — Advanced memory forensics framework

Malware Detection

Signature-Based or Pattern Matching: A signature is an algorithm or hash (a number derived from a string of text) that uniquely identifies a specific virus.

Heuristic Analysis or Pro-Active Defense: Heuristic scanning is similar to signature scanning, except that instead of looking for specific signatures, heuristic scanning looks for certain instructions or commands within a program that are not found in typical application programs.

Rule Based: The component of the heuristic engine that conducts the analysis (the analyzer) extracts certain rules from a file and this rules will be compared against a set of rules for malicious code.

Behavioral Blocking: The suspicious behavior approach, by contrast, does not attempt to identify known viruses, but instead monitors the behavior of all programs.

Weight-Based: A heuristic engine based on a weight-based system, which is a quite old styled approach, rates each functionality it detects with a certain weight according to the degree of danger

Sandbox: allows the file to run in a controlled virtual system (or“sandbox”) to see what it does.

Important Tools in malware analysis tutorials

• YARA – Pattern matching tool for analysts.
• Yara rules generator – Generate YARA rules based on a set of malware samples. Also, contains good strings DB to avoid false positives.
• File Scanning Framework – Modular, recursive file scanning solution.
• hash deep – Compute digest hashes with a variety of algorithms.
• Loki – Host-based scanner for IOCs.
• Malfunction – Catalog and compare malware at a function level.
• MASTIFF – Static analysis framework.

Web Domain Analysis

In this Malware Analysis Tutorial, Domain analysis is the process by which a software engineer learns background information, Inspects domains and IP addresses.

Domain analysis should simply include a brief summary of the information you have found, along with references that will enable others to find that information.

Important Tools

• SpamCop – IP-based spam block list.
• SpamHaus – Block list based on domains and IPs.
• Sucuri SiteCheck – Free Website Malware and Security Scanner.
• TekDefense Automatic – OSINT tool for gathering information about URLs, IPs, or hashes.
• URLQuery – Free URL Scanner.
• IPinfo – Gather information about an IP or domain by searching online resources.
• Whois – DomainTools free online whois search.
• mail checker – Cross-language temporary email detection library.

Network interactions Based Malware Analysis Tutorials

While focusing on network security monitoring the comprehensive platform for more general network traffic analysis as well.

A passive network sniffer/packet capturing tool in order to detect operating systems, sessions, hostnames, open ports, etc. without putting any traffic on the network.

IPv4/6, TCP, UDP, ICMPv4/6, IGMP, and Raw across Ethernet, PPP, SLIP, FDDI, Token Ring, and null interfaces, and understands BPF filter logic in the same fashion as more common packet sniffing.

Important Tools

• Tcpdump – Collect network traffic.
• tcpick – Trach and reassemble TCP streams from network traffic.
• tcpxtract – Extract files from network traffic.
• Wireshark – The network traffic analysis tool.
• CapTipper – Malicious HTTP traffic explorer.
• chopshop – Protocol analysis and decoding framework.
• CloudShark – Web-based tool for packet analysis and malware traffic detection

Debugging & Debugger

In malware analysis tutorials, Debuggers are one of the useful malware analysis tools that allow an analysis of code at a low level. One of the most important functionalities of a debugger is the breakpoint.

When a breakpoint is hit, execution of the program is stopped and control is given to the debugger, allowing malware analysis of the environment at the time.

A debugger is a piece of software that utilizes the Central Processing Unit (CPU) facilities that were specifically designed for the purpose.

A debugger provides insight into how a program performs its tasks, allows the user to control the execution, and provides access to the debugged program’s environment.

This could be very helpful when analyzing malware, as it would be possible to see how it tries to detect tampering and skip the garbage instructions inserted on purpose.

Important Tools

• obj dump – Part of GNU Binutils, for static analysis of Linux binaries.
• OllyDbg – An assembly-level debugger for Windows executable
• FPort – Reports open TCP/IP and UDP ports in a live system and map them to the owning application.
• GDB – The GNU debugger.
• IDA Pro – Windows disassembler and debugger, with a free evaluation version.
• Immunity Debugger – Debugger for malware analysis and more, with a Python API.

Analyze malicious URLs

Today, websites are exposed to various threats that exploit their vulnerabilities. A compromised website will be used as a stepping-stone and will serve attackers’ evil purposes.

For instance, URL redirection mechanisms have been widely used as a means to perform web-based attacks covertly.

Redirection refers to automatically replacing access destinations, and it is generally controlled by an HTTP protocol on the web.

In addition to this conventional method, other methods for automatically accessing external web content, e.g., iframe tag, have been often used, particularly for web-based attacks.

Important Tools

• Firebug – Firefox extension for web development.
• Java Decompiler – Decompile and inspect Java apps.
• jsunpack-n – A javascript unpacker that emulates browser functionality.
• Krakatau – Java decompiler, assembler, and disassembler.
• Malzilla – Analyze malicious web pages.

Sandboxes Technique

Sandboxing is a critical security system that segregates programs, keeping malevolent or failing projects from harming or snooping on whatever remains of your PC.

The product you utilize is as of now sandboxing a significant part of the code you run each day.

A sandbox is a firmly controlled condition where projects can be run.

Sandboxes limit what a bit of code can do, giving it similarly the same number of consents as it needs without including extra authorizations could be abused.

Important Tools

• firmware.re – Unpacks, scans and analyzes almost any firmware package.
• Hybrid Analysis – Online malware analysis tool, powered by VxSandbox.
• IRMA – An asynchronous and customizable analysis platform for suspicious files.
• Cuckoo Sandbox – Open source, self-hosted sandbox, and automated analysis system.
• cuckoo-modified – Modified version of Cuckoo Sandbox released under the GPL.
• PDF Examiner – Analyse suspicious PDF files.
• ProcDot – A graphical malware analysis toolkit.
• Recomposer – A helper script for safely uploading binaries to sandbox sites.
• Sand droid – Automatic and complete Android application analysis system.

Conclusion

In this malware analysis online tutorial, we have described the various methods of analyzing the malware and various type of tools used for analyzing the malware. it’s not limited, you can utilize here the complete malware analysis tools.