5 Types Of Malware Analysis

5 Types Of Malware Analysis

The process of identifying and minimising possible dangers in a website, application, or server is known as malware analysis. It is an essential procedure that guarantees sensitive data protection for a corporation as well as computer security. Vulnerabilities are addressed through malware analysis before they become major issues.

If you want to put it more simply, malware analysis is the process of figuring out the actions and purposes of a questionable file or URL. The threat, if any, can be reduced the more you understand the suspicious file.

Types Of Malware Analysis 1. Hybrid Malware Analysis We already know that when malware has more complex code, simple static analysis is unreliable, and complex malware can occasionally evade detection by sandbox technology.

The best of both methods may be achieved by combining the two different malware analysis methodologies.

In addition to extracting many more IOCs from statically generated and previously unobserved code, hybrid analysis can find buried dangerous code. It can identify unknown threats, including those coming from the most advanced malware.

The hybrid analysis takes the data produced by behavioural analysis and applies static analysis to it. Take into account dangerous software that executes and modifies memory.

That will be detectable by the dynamic analysis, and analysts will know right away to run a static analysis on the memory dump. More IOCs and exposed zero-day exploits will arise from this.

2. Static Malware Analysis Static malware analysis looks for indications of harmful intent in files. A malware programme that is actively operating is not necessary for a simple static analysis. It is helpful for exposing malicious libraries, packaged files, or infrastructure.

Technical signs such as file names, hashes, strings such as IP addresses, domains, and file header data are discovered in this type of malware investigation. The virus may be seen using a variety of tools, such as network analyzers and disassemblers, without actually executing them. These instruments can compile data on the operation of the specific malware.

Some sophisticated malware may exhibit dangerous runtime behaviour that can go unnoticed since static malware analysis does not execute the infection code.

3. Dynamic Malware Analysis A sandbox is a secure environment where suspected dangerous code is executed in dynamic malware analysis. Security audit professionals may closely monitor the virus in activity in this closed, isolated virtual machine without worrying about infecting the computer or the network. The threat and its genuine nature are more clearly seen thanks to this strategy.

As a side advantage, automated sandboxing saves time that would have otherwise been spent on reverse engineering a file to find dangerous code.

Dynamic analysis can be difficult, especially when facing intelligent opponents who are aware that sandboxes would ultimately be exploited. Therefore, opponents conceal their code such that it is inactive until a set of circumstances is satisfied as a sort of deceit. Only then the code will run.

4. Behavioral Analysis This type of malware analysis focuses on understanding when a piece of malware is used, what actions it takes when it’s run, as well as what programs are affected by it .

5. Automated Malware Analysis Through an automated workflow, the malware's many behavioural and static features are examined during automated analysis. The software's logic may not be revealed by this, but it is incredibly helpful for determining its general categorization and which malware family it may belong to. Automation is capable of producing comprehensive reports and supplying data to incident response systems, ensuring that a human analyst receives just the most crucial signals. You may achieve this with the aid of many tools, like the AI-powered SNDBOX and Falcon Sandbox.

Bottom Line Security Analysts can use a variety of malware analysis tools to help them with the reverse engineering of malware samples. It aims to stop potentially harmful malware assaults and avoid major damage control, as various malware samples being discovered daily through malware analysis online.