What is Malware Analysis?

Malware analysis is the study of the unique features, objectives, sources, and potential effects of harmful software and code, such as spyware, viruses, malvertising, and ransomware. It analyzes malware code to understand how it varies from other kinds. 

Below is a malware analysis guide to help you better understand this unique cybersecurity methodology.

Malware analysis provides several significant benefits. For example, it enables organizations to perform the following malware analysis steps:

1. Figure out how much damage an intrusion caused
2. Identify who may have installed malware inside the system
3. Determine the attack's level of sophistication
4. Pinpoint the exact vulnerability the malware exploited to access your system

You can break down the malware analysis process into four stages:

Static properties refer to strings of code embedded inside the malware file, hashes, header details, and metadata. Static properties analysis provides a quick and easy way to gather helpful information about malware because the malware does not have to be executed for you to study it.

Interactive behavior analysis involves a security analyst interacting with malware running in a lab, making observations regarding its behavior. In this way, you can better understand how malware uses different elements of a computer system, such as its memory.

Fully automated analysis scans suspected malware files using automated tools, focusing on what the malware can do once inside your system. After the analysis, you get a report outlining the potential damage to assets connected to your network.

Manual code reversing breaks down the code used to build the malware to learn how it works and what it is capable of doing. This is a time-consuming process that requires significant skill. However, when used correctly, manual code reversing can reveal valuable information about the malware.

The malware analysis market size is expected to grow at a rate of 31% over the next few years in several major markets, including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Multiple factors drive this growth:

1. Increased number of cyberattacks: The growing frequency of cyber assaults on organizations has created a sense of urgency that will significantly impact the malware analysis market. Because so many threats need to be detected, studied, and stopped, malware analysis will become a very important tool in the battle against attackers.
2. Too many false positives from threat detection systems: Although threat detection systems are valuable tools, they can also produce false positives that waste IT teams' time. With malware analysis, you can identify the threats that pose great danger to your organization by studying their behavior, then focusing your energies on addressing these.

Several malware analysis tools are available on the market, and here are some of the most well-known:

Process Hacker enables analysts to understand the processes that are running on any given device on the network. This can be very useful as you allow malware to execute because you can watch the processes it impacts. With this information, you can determine how different computers react when malware is introduced to your system.

Fiddler can observe and study malicious traffic because it serves as a proxy, accepting and managing network traffic. Running Fiddler enables malware analysts to study the code and locate the hardcoded malicious sites that will be used to download the malware. 

Limon is a controlled sandbox environment for studying malware that attacks Linux systems, enabling IT teams to monitor how the malware behaves and determine what it was designed to do.

PeStudio identifies potentially suspicious files by analyzing what is happening on your system. After it identifies malicious files, it quarantines them and assigns each a hash. You can then use each hash to access the malware and run it in a safe environment to learn how it behaves.

Ghidra disassembles malware instead of merely identifying it. It then takes whatever it finds in the malware code and translates it into something a human can read. In this way, it shows you what the malware designer might have been thinking while writing the malicious code.

Cuckoo Sandbox studies malware in a safe sandbox environment, recording its activity and then generating a report. This provides IT teams with data outlining how the malware attempts to impact your system.

CrowdStrike Falcon automatically analyzes malware by combining CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence with a sandbox environment. By comparing the malware’s behavior in the sandbox to information from CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence, Falcon Insight can determine whether the malware already exists or is new to the threat landscape.