Cyberspace is quickly becoming overwhelmed with ever-evolving malware that breaches all security defenses and secretly leaks confidential business data. One of the most pressing challenges faced by business organizations when they experience a cyber-attack is that, more often than not, those organizations do not have the knowledge nor readiness of how to analyze malware. The objective of this research is to present the fundamentals of malware reverse-engineering, the tools, and techniques needed to properly analyze malicious programs to determine their characteristics. Those tools and techniques will provide insights to incident response teams and digital investigation professionals. In order to stop hackers in their tracks, we need to equip cyber security professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to detect and respond to malware attacks. Additionally, the authors discuss what ransomware is, how it infects systems, and how to prevent infection. It will also examine some different variations of ransomware, as well as explore some cases of ransomware.
TopWhat Is Malware Analysis?
Before we try to understand what is malware analysis and why malware analysis is important in the context of cyber security, let’s try to define malware. Malware is code that is utilized to perform malicious actions with the intent of causing harm and destruction on computer systems and networks. Malware is typically designed to take advantage of some type of security flaw or backdoor and benefit at the victim’s expense. Moreover, malware is often written by people or organizations to use its capabilities for malicious intentions and purposes.
Malware analysis aims to examine malware's behavior. The objective of malware analysis is to gain an understanding of the inner workings of malware and how to detect and remove it. To reliably analyze malware, we analyze the malware specimen in a safe environment to identify its characteristics and functionalities so security defenses can be developed to secure and protect a business organization’s digital assets (CISA INSIGHTS, 2019).
Many of the cyber incidents and data breaches that we see and hear about in the news are typically carried out using some sort of malware, which might be designed to enable the attacker to gain remote control of a compromised computing system, steal business-sensitive data, spy on the victim’s online activities, spread within the victim/target organization, and so on. That’s where the importance of knowing how to examine and analyze malicious programs comes into play as it’s critical to be able to control the situation and minimize the damage and disruption to business operations and the organization at large (Hachman, 2017).
One of the most pressing challenges faced by business organizations when they experience a cyber-attack is that, more often than not, those organizations do not have the knowledge nor readiness of how to analyze malware once it has been discovered on their production computer networks. This is where this paper can help, this paper will help shed light on the tools and techniques needed to properly analyze malicious programs to determine their characteristics which can prove extremely helpful when investigating data breaches as those tools and techniques will provide insights to incident response teams and digital investigation professionals. Some of the key things that cyber professionals can learn when analyzing malware are questions related to the nature of the threat posed by malware, the objective of the adversary using the malware, how to contain, eradicate, and recover from an incident, and perhaps more importantly, how to strengthen cyber defenses so that the cyber-attack does not reoccur in the future (CISA INSIGHTS, 2019).