How to Analyze Malware for Technical Writing
Analyzing New Malware
In the ever-changing world of cybersecurity, new threats appear and evolve on a regular basis. Sharing information about them is an important part of fighting cybercrime and keeping people and organizations safe. To do so efficiently, being prepared will make the best use of your—and your team’s—time when analyzing an emerging threat.
In this blog, we cover various situations that researchers encounter when they need to publish their findings and provide some suggestions on how to approach them, along with a suggested workflow for approaching the analysis most efficiently. Finally, we apply this strategy to analyze a ransomware sample. Efficient analysis is extremely important when investigating new malware. Challenges and Solutions
When a new threat emerges, there are a few common challenges that researchers face during analysis. Here are a few ways to handle them so you can produce clear and purposeful findings.
Urgency
In many cases, there is a relatively narrow window of time in which to release the publication, if we want the topic to be hot and the corresponding material to be relevant.
The solution is to focus on the most important questions that need answers. Who are the potential readers of the article? How will they benefit from reading it?
How will the time costs associated with each section compare to its benefits?
Beginning your work by answering these questions will help shape the material in the right direction and manage time properly.
Novelty
For many attacks that hit the news, the related malware may not yet have been analyzed by other researchers. This increases the amount of work required to understand all parts of the relevant functionality, as there is little to no information to use as a starting point.
To address this issue, it is worth remembering that in many cases, modern malware families and attacker groups already have some roots. Tracking these connections allows researchers to find previous iterations of similar projects and reduce the amount of time required to understand malware’s functionality.
Complexity The consequences of simple cyberattacks aren’t generally big enough to attract the attention of the public. What that means for researchers is that if something is worth writing an article about, it’s likely to be quite complex and therefore time-consuming to analyze.The solution here might be to split the big task into smaller tasks. Apart from prioritizing based on the article’s focus, it also allows the analysis to done by a group, with different people focusing on different parts of functionality. Exchanging knowledge on a regular basis about what has already been covered will help the team to be efficient and not waste time analyzing the same parts multiple times. Suggested Workflow Here is a common workflow that should allow researchers to approach the analysis of new executable samples efficiently and effectively.The second step, Behavioral Analysis, refers to the blackbox-style analysis that generally involves the execution of a sample under various monitoring tools and on sandboxes. The Dynamic Analysis step refers the use of a […]
